Self-Distancing Before an Acute Stressor Buffers Against Maladaptive Psychological and Behavioral Consequences: Implications for Distancing Theory and Social Anxiety Treatment.

Abstract

Many therapies exist to help people combat stress. However, they typically require substantial time and money to be effective, an observation that has led researchers to explore whether it is possible to design less intensive interventions that build on basic science findings concerning the mechanisms underlying stress regulation. Initial evidence demonstrating the feasibility of such approaches comes from research indicating that single-session attention modification programs attenuate the negative psychological and behavioral sequelae of acute stress. However, whether interventions that target how people cognitively construe stress-arousing situations are similarly effective is less clear. To address this issue, the present research developed a brief cognitive reconstrual exercise that targeted participants’ tendency to self-distance as they reflected on an upcoming pubic speaking challenge. Specifically, participants assigned to reason about their current thoughts and feelings from either a self-immersed (think though your current feelings using the pronoun I) or a self-distanced (e.g., think through your current feelings using you and/or your own name when referring to yourself) perspective after stress was induced, but before their speech. The implications of this manipulation were then examined using psychological (i.e., shame and rumination in Study 1, anxiety and cognitive appraisals in Study 2) and behavioral (i.e., speech performance and regulatory depletion in Study 1) measures. Study 1 found that participants who self-distanced prior to the speech task gave more impressive performances, reported lower subsequent shame and rumination, and were less depleted of resources compared to those who immersed. Study 2 investigated whether the beneficial effects of self-distancing could be due to lower threat and greater challenge appraisals of the anticipated stressor. Self-distanced participants in this second study reported less threat appraisal of the expected speech task than participants in the self-immersed and no-instruction groups. Neither Study 1 nor 2 found that trait social anxiety level interacted with condition to predict any effects. Together, they provide evidence that a brief cognitive reconstrual exercise can buffer people, even those most vulnerable to social anxiety, against the negative psychological and behavioral consequences of acute stress, and highlight self-distancing as a mechanism that future anxiety interventions should consider targeting.PHDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99929/1/aburson_1.pd