Social anxiety enhances recognition of task-irrelevant threat words
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Are highly socially anxious people easily distracted in general, or is this bias specific to socially threatening material? In a simultaneous target-distractor paradigm, we investigated if memory for targets and distractors was affected by threat-relatedness. We found that emory bias is specific to threat-related distractors in high social anxiety. When social anxiety is primed, attention and memory may be specifically heightened for irrelevant, socially threatening information.