Measuring online interpretations and attributions of social situations: Links with adolescent social anxiety Simone P.W. Haller a , Sophie M. Raeder a , Gaia Scerif a , Kathrin Cohen Kadosh a , Jennifer Y.F. Lau a, b, * a Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK b Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK article info Article history: Received 29 April 2015 Received in revised form 1 September 2015 Accepted 18 September 2015 Available online 22 October 2015 Keywords: Cognitive bias Interpretation Attribution Social anxiety Development Adolescence abstract Objective: We evaluated the utility of a novel, picture-based tool to measure how adolescents interpret and attribute cause to social exchanges and whether biases in these processes relate to social anxiety. Briefly presented ambiguous visual social scenes, each containing a photograph of the adolescent as the protagonist, were followed by three possible interpretations (positive, negative, neutral/unrelated) and two possible causal attributions (internal, external) to which participants responded. Method: Ninety-five adolescents aged 14 to 17 recruited from mainstream schools, with varying levels of social anxiety rated the likelihood of positive, negative and unrelated interpretations before selecting the single interpretation they deemed as most likely. This was followed by a question prompting them to decide between an internal or external causal attribution for the interpreted event. Results: Across scenarios, adolescents with higher levels of social anxiety rated negative interpretations as more likely and positive interpretations as less likely compared to lower socially anxious adolescents. Higher socially anxious adolescents were also more likely to select internal attributions to negative and less likely to select internal attributions for positive events than adolescents with lower levels of social anxiety. Conclusions: Adolescents with higher social anxiety display cognitive biases in interpretation and attribution. This tool is suitable for measuring cognitive biases of complex visual-social cues in youth populations with social anxiety and simulates the demands of daily social experiences more closely. Limitations: As we did not measure depressive symptoms, we cannot be sure that biases linked to social anxiety are not due to concurrent low mood. © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 1. Introduction Anxiety disorders are common in adolescence (Kessler, Stang, Wittchen, Stein, & Walters, 1999). Since adolescence is generally associated with increased salience of social cues, heightened self- consciousness and increasing importance of peer relationships, it is not surprising that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most common and disabling anxiety conditions in youth e per- sisting to explain a significant proportion of adult SAD (Kessler et al., 1999; Wittchen, Stein, & Kessler, 1999). SAD is marked by a persistent and disabling fear of social interactions, specifically a fear of negative evaluations by others (Clark & Wells, 1995; Foa, Franklin, Perry, & Herbert, 1996). Consequentially, individuals with SAD often avoid social situations or approach them with maladaptive social behavior, thereby maintaining and reinforcing their fears (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). Under- standing how adolescents with social anxiety process information in anticipation of and during social exchanges is therefore crucial for understanding how symptoms arise and for interventive pur- poses, how they abate. Cognitive biases represent a key factor in the maintenance of social anxiety by introducing systematic distortions in the pro- cessing of social cues, thereby increasing the salience of socially threatening information in the environment (Clark & Wells, 1995; Muris & Field, 2008; Ollendick & Hirshfeld-Becker, 2002; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). As social interactions often involve dynamic and subtle, indirect or limited cues to mental states, the decoding of * Corresponding author. Psychology Department, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, PO77, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK. E-mail address: jennifer.lau@kcl.ac.uk (J.Y.F. Lau). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jbtep http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2015.09.009 0005-7916/© 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. J. Behav. Ther. & Exp. Psychiat. 50 (2016) 250e256