PSY Journal 1-2 pages DUE IN 3 HRS

1. What is the question the authors are asking?

They asked about the relation between self-focused attention and interpersonal consequences of the social anxiety. Also, how the interpersonal interaction will influence the social anxiety. On top of that, they hypothesized in their study, the control group will show increased uncomfortable sign while& after the interpersonal activities,, like the less verbal speaking and more protective body language. Also, they expected the control group will show more negative effect and fairly low in positive effect after the study.

2. Why do the authors believe this question is important?

Because they have found people have agreement on the positive relation between the anxiety arousal and the shown anxiety symptoms, also the interaction and social anxiety. But, the relation and function of how the self- focused attention will trigger and influence the social anxiety when interpersonal activity happens.

3. How do they try to answer this question?

They conducted a study to testify whether the interpersonal activity will influence or trigger the social anxiety. In order to do that, they collected 120 participants after they have these participants did SPAI, the ones who got highest and lowest 20 percentile scores people have been selected as the SA group, which means they have shown the possibility of being diagnosed as social phobia patients. And the rest of the 120p people will consist of the NSA group, which names after the people who do not have any social phobia symptom when having interpersonal interaction. After having them grouped, they will be paired as dyads automatically, the SA with NSA, or the NSA with NSA. But, they are not informed their identity in this study. Then, each group will have 5 minutes session to interact with the other one, they will be video recorded at the same time they started the session, and there will be people who spectate their verbal code and nonverbal code when the recording started. Each codes represent different “behavior” of participant, for the verbal code, we have RS, ES,Q,ST AND GT for information sharing. RS is for complaining and support words said by participants, ES specifies the empathetic comments, ST represents the information shared about participant themselves, GT means the sharing information that unrelated to participants themselves. Same to nonverbal codes, we have polite smile, pleasurable smile, frown, the fidgeting hand position. After the 5 minutes session with each other, the researchers will have participants to do 2 questionnaires, PANAS and QI, one for detecting the PA and NA level of participants before and after the study, one for checking the level of satisfaction of the just finished interaction.

4. What did they find?

They found out the results not exactly same as they predicted, like for the level of NA in SA- NSA group, it did not have a significantly rising after the session is ended, either to the questions asked in the session, SA- NSA group almost having same amount of question asked during the session. However, they did found out that SA participants tend to be more silent and was willing not be the leading questioner in the session. Also they showed more self- talk while talking to their partner. For the verbal codes, SA participants was shown fairly higher level of RS than their NSA partners were, Same results to EC level. On the contrary hand, for the nonverbal codes, SA participants shown more polite smile, more fidgeting hands positioning, and also more polite smile no matter what smile their NSA partner was displaying.

5. How did the authors interpret what they found?

They concluding the even though SA participants show more silent moment, more self-talk, more polite smile and more fidgeting hand positioning, the level of their negative effect were not increasing while they were interacting with NSA partners, surprisingly the positive affect level increased somehow., Which shows the interpersonal activities did have influence to social anxiety. At the same time, all the symptom of more time staying silent, more self- talk is more like a way to stay self- focused, which the researcher suggest will influence the interaction with the partner in future. Because the NSA participants are more likely to have a pleasurable interaction instead of the long time “one sided” or self- focused interaction. Based on that, researcher ensured that the self- focused attention and the interpersonal interaction did have impact on social anxiety.

6. Briefly discuss two original critiques of the study and/or relevant research questions or

First of all, in the verbal codes area, the researchers did not cover the result of all the codes such as information sharing codes, and the other problem is when the coders decide the amount of question asked by each other, it made me wonder that does that code eligible to be an “code” in this study? Because somehow we all know the quality of a conversation does not depend on how many questions they ask each other. The quality of the question matter more.

The other critique is in this report, SA participant is the role we studying, but the interpersonal words mean a two- sides interaction, based on that, we might need to divide some proportion to the NSA participants as well, maybe that will bring us something interesting as well.