3/4/25 Allie Adamis: Cognitive Mechanisms of Social Anxiety in Daily Life: Unique Effects of Negative Self-Focused Attention on Post-Event Processing
Clinical Brown Bag
Allie Adamis, MSc
PhD Candidate
Date: Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Time: 12:00- 1:00pm
Location: Wilson Hall 316
Cognitive Mechanisms of Social Anxiety in Daily Life: Unique Effects of Negative Self-Focused Attention on Post-Event Processing
Allie Adamis, MSc, is a third-year PhD candidate in Vanderbilt’s Clinical Science program. She completed her undergraduate studies at Northwestern University and her post-baccalaureate research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Allie’s research interests are centered on cognitive mechanisms underlying the maintenance of anxiety and related disorders. In the Emotion and Anxiety Research Laboratory led by Dr. Bunmi Olatunji, Allie is applying an experimental psychopathology framework to examine the role of attention, cognitive control, and repetitive negative thinking in the maintenance and treatment of anxiety. Presentation Abstract: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by biased patterns of attention that are theorized to play a key role in maintaining symptoms. SAD has been linked to externally oriented attentional biases (i.e., towards social-evaluative threats) and internally oriented attentional biases (i.e., towards anxiety-laden thoughts and sensations), both of which might increase proneness for post-event processing (PEP), a form of rumination about the negative aspects of past social events. However, prior research examining attentional biases in SAD has primarily been conducted in laboratory settings, leaving unanswered questions about the naturalistic patterns of attention and cognition that most strongly characterize and maintain social anxiety. The present study applied ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine attentional biases during real-world social interactions and their effects on subsequent PEP in a sample of adults with high (n = 108) and low (n = 94) levels of social anxiety. Three times per day for one week, participants reported their attention orientation (i.e., internal versus external), the valence of their attentional foci (i.e., negative versus positive), and their degree of PEP following salient social events. Results revealed that high social anxiety was associated with relatively more internally oriented and negatively valanced attention during social interactions than controls, which in turn predicted increases in subsequent PEP. Findings highlight the salience of negative self-focused attention and ruminative thinking as maintenance factors in social anxiety and suggest that interventions targeting these mechanisms could show promise in future research.