Confirmatory reasoning in social phobia: How does belief bias relate to complaint reduction?

Dysfunctional beliefs, such as beliefs about rejection or shame, play a vital
role in social phobia. It has been found that highly anxious people reason in a
way that acts to confirm rather than to falsify their dysfunctional beliefs
(also known as belief bias, Vroling and de Jong, 2007). This reasoning bias
logically helps maintain the social phobia through maintaining the
dysfunctional, social phobic, beliefs. Belief bias is in itself a common
reasoning process. The causal status of this reasoning bias is still unclear.
In a first attempt to tackle part of the causality question, we wish to study
the decrease of belief bias over the course of symptom reduction (through
treatment). Furthermore, the current study design enables us to examine the
predictive value of belief bias in the decrease and/or increase in social
phobic complaints. Through these analyses, a clear interpretation of the role
of belief bias in complaint maintenance can be achieved (belief bias should
decrease when symptoms decrease) and some light can be shed on the role of
belief bias in complaint development (predictive value of belief bias on return
of complaint).
Furthermore, it is still unclear whether belief bias becomes dysfunctional
because of the underlying dysfunctional beliefs, or that social phobic patients
are indeed characterised by more belief biased reasoning which makes it
difficult to integrate counterintuitive information. We wish to target this
distinction by measuring both reasoning performance (amount of belief bias) and
automatically associated dysfunctional beliefs.
Finally, we wish to investigate how other information processing biases develop
over the course of treatment. More specifically, we wish to investigate the
role of automatic evaluation tendencies in emotion recognition, and biased
response tendencies.

Our main objective is to gain insight in the possibly causal role of belief
bias in maintaining social phobia. As a subsidiary issue, we wish to
disentangle the differential influences of automatic beliefs and analytic
reasoning processes in generating belief biased responding. Furthermore, we
wish to gain insight in the relation of facial emotion detection (and related
behaviour patterns) and social phobia.

Quasi-experimental study

Social phobia patients will be tested on 3 occasions at their treatment centre.
Panic disorder patients will only be tested at T1, prior to the start of
treatment. testing will take place at the treatment facility. Non-clinical
control subjects will be tested on T1 and T2 (separated by 6 months) at the
university laboratory.