Individuals experience varying levels of anxiety in social situations. When intense and enduring, this anxiety can lead to difficulties in daily functioning. Considering the often-central roles that relationships and interactions play in people's lives, it becomes crucial to understand how unhelpful levels of social anxiety are maintained over time. According to cognitive theories of social anxiety disorder, post-event processing (PEP; e.g., the review of the negative aspects of past social situations), is one of the factors that can perpetuate symptoms of social anxiety. The objective of this dissertation was to investigate PEP and its relationship with other important cognitive and affective factors across two studies to better understand its role in social anxiety. In Study 1, I assessed the temporal links between PEP, anticipatory processing (AP), anxiety, performance appraisals, and memory. Participants (n = 101) completed two speeches, four days apart. In between the two speeches, they answered ecological momentary assessment alerts to measure PEP about the first speech and AP about the second speech. I found that both PEP and AP decreased over the two-day assessment period. Feeling more anxious during the first speech also triggered a cascade of negative thinking and affect, including worse performance appraisals, increased PEP and AP, and higher anxiety levels in anticipation of the second speech. Contrary to expectations, PEP was unrelated to change in performance appraisals over time. There was also preliminary evidence that PEP might be linked to the phenomenological memory qualities of the first speech, namely its valence and emotional intensity. In Study 2, I extended these findings by examining positive PEP and pleasant social interactions in addition to the typically studied negative PEP and stressful social interactions. Participants (n = 411) brought back to mind a recent stressful or pleasant social interaction, completed self-reported measures, and wrote a description of the recalled interaction. Participants who recalled a stressful interaction reported engaging in more negative PEP, and less positive PEP, compared to those who recalled a pleasant interaction. I also observed that higher social anxiety was linked with more negative and less positive PEP irrespective of whether the PEP was following a stressful or a pleasant interaction. Moreover, participants' descriptions of the interactions contained more negative words when they also reported having engaged in more negative PEP. Negative PEP was also associated with a more negative emotionally intense self-reported memory of the interaction. In addition, descriptions contained more positive and less negative words when participants reported engaging in more positive PEP. Positive PEP's relationship with memory depended on whether the interaction was stressful or pleasant. For the former, positive PEP was related to a more positive memory; for the latter, it was related to increased emotional intensity. Both studies help elucidate the complex nature of PEP. Their conclusions have many theoretical and clinical implications for the PEP and social anxiety field (e.g., how negative PEP evolves over time, how high social anxiety may be characterized by both more negative and less positive PEP). Considering methodological strengths and limitations provides additional questions and directions for future research examining negative and positive PEP.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by an intense fear of negative evaluation from others in social and/or performance situations. Research has demonstrated that socially anxious individuals' post-event processing, or post-mortem review of social situations, often affects their levels of anxiety, negative emotions, interpretations, and memories of events (Brozovich & Heimberg, 2008). Furthermore, research has shown that processing negative descriptions using imagery is more emotion-evoking than semantic processing of the same material (Holmes & Mathews, 2005; Holmes & Mathews, 2010). The present study investigated post-event processing involving mental imagery and its effects on mood, anxiety, and potentially biased interpretations of social and nonsocial events. Socially anxious and non-anxious participants were told they would give a 5 min impromptu speech at the end of the experimental session. They were then randomly assigned to one of three manipulation conditions: post-event processing imagery (PEP-Imagery), post-event processing semantic (PEP-Semantic), or a Control condition. In the post-event processing conditions, participants recalled a past anxiety-provoking speech and thought about the anticipated speech either using imagery (PEP-Imagery) or focusing on their meaning (PEP-Semantic). Following the condition manipulation, participants completed a variety of affect, anxiety, and interpretation measures. Consistent with our predictions, socially anxious individuals in the PEP-Imagery condition displayed greater anxiety than individuals in the other conditions immediately following the induction and before the anticipated speech task. Socially anxious individuals in the PEP-Imagery condition also interpreted ambiguous scenarios in a more socially anxious manner than individuals in the Control condition. The impact of imagery during post-event processing in social anxiety and its implications for cognitive-behavioral interventions are discussed. / Psychology

Exposure therapy has received a great deal of support as an effective treatment for social anxiety. However, not all those who undergo exposure therapy improve, and some of those who do respond continue to report significant levels of symptoms. A theorized mechanism of change for exposure therapy is extinction learning. Extinction learning is believed to occur across exposure sessions during which new associations are formed and stored in memory. Individuals with social anxiety are prone to engage in post event processing (PEP), or rumination, after social experiences, which may interfere with extinction learning, and thus attenuate response to treatment. The current study examined whether PEP limits treatment response to two different exposure based treatments, a group based cognitive behavioral intervention and an individually based virtual reality exposure therapy among participants (n = 75) diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. The findings suggested that PEP decreased as a result of treatment and that social anxiety symptoms for those with greater amounts of PEP improved at a slower rate of change than those with lower levels of PEP. Implications for the role of PEP on treatment response are discussed.

Exposure therapy has received a great deal of support as an effective treatment for social anxiety. However, not all those who undergo exposure therapy improve, and some of those who do respond continue to report significant levels of symptoms. A theorized mechanism of change for exposure therapy is extinction learning. Extinction learning is believed to occur across exposure sessions during which new associations are formed and stored in memory. Individuals with social anxiety are prone to engage in post event processing (PEP), or rumination, after social experiences, which may interfere with extinction learning, and thus attenuate response to treatment. The current study examined whether PEP limits treatment response to two different exposure based treatments, a group based cognitive behavioral intervention and an individually based virtual reality exposure therapy among participants (n = 75) diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. The findings suggested that PEP decreased as a result of treatment and that social anxiety symptoms for those with greater amounts of PEP improved at a slower rate of change than those with lower levels of PEP. Implications for the role of PEP on treatment response are discussed.

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Background: Based on the assumptions that depersonalization symptoms are relevant for test anxiety maintenance, we examined their frequency, psychological predictors, association with anxiety symptoms, and association with test performance. Sampling and Methods: In Study 1, 203 students rated their test anxiety severity and depersonalization in their last oral examination. In Study 2, we assessed test anxiety 1 week before an oral examination, depersonalization, safety behaviors, self-focused attention, and negative appraisals of depersonalization directly after the examination, and post-event processing 1 week later among 67 students. Results: In Study 1, 47.3% reported at least one moderate depersonalization symptom. In Study 2, test anxiety and negative appraisals of depersonalization significantly predicted depersonalization. Depersonalization was linked to a higher intensity of safety behaviors and post-event processing but not to self-focused attention. It was not related to performance. Conclusion: Results are limited by the non-random sampling and the small sample size of Study 2. However, by showing that depersonalization contributes to the processes the maintenance of test anxiety, the findings confirm that depersonalization – normally understood as an adaptive mechanism to cope with stressful events – can become maladaptive.