Objectives: The present study examined whether social phobia is an anxiety disorder associated with a memory bias toward threat.
Design: Social phobic (N = 16) and non-anxious (N = 17) individuals were compared on their recall of evaluative threat and neutral prose passage content.
Method: Participants were presented with two evaluative threat and two neutral prose passages and completed an immediate free recall task after each trial.
Results: Contrary to expectation, individuals with social phobia recalled a smaller percentage of units from the evaluative threat passages than non-anxious individuals.
Conclusion: Consistent with the vigilance-avoidance theory, it is suggested that social phobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by the avoidance of elaborate processing of threatening material.