Behaviour Research and Therapy 39 (2001) 101–113 www.elsevier.com/locate/brat A reaction time paradigm to assess (implicit) complaint- specific dysfunctional beliefs P.J. de Jong * , W. Pasman, M. Kindt, M.A. van den Hout Department of Medical, Clinical & Experimental Psychology, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands Received 28 June 1999; accepted 28 November 1999 Abstract We investigated whether an implicit association test (IAT) can be used to assess dysfunctional beliefs in the realm of psychopathology. As a first exploration we therefore constructed a IAT that was designed to differentiate between high and low social anxious individuals. Social situation and neutral words were the targets (e.g. date vs hall), and positive and negative outcomes (e.g. compliment vs rejection) the associa- ted attributes. High social anxious women (N=32) showed the predicted deterioration of task performance if the required responses switched from compatible to incompatible with the idea that social situations are related to negative outcomes and vice versa, whereas the opposite was true for low anxious women (N=32). Thus a modified IAT seems a useful and highly flexible tool to implicitly assess complaint-specific dysfunc- tional associations and may be a valuable addition to the usual (explicit) self-report measures of patients’ beliefs.  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Several theorists have argued that anxiety and affective disorders are maintained by highly specific dysfunctional beliefs (Beck, Emery & Greenberg, 1985). Panic patients consider palpi- tations as a predictor of cardiac arrest, social phobic individuals believe that blushing is evaluated as a sign of incompetence, and hypochondriacs consider a headache as evidence for the presence of a brain tumour, etcetera. Thus far, individuals’ dysfunctional beliefs are mostly directly measured by means of self- report instruments (Thorpe & Salkovskis, 1995; Arntz, Lavy, van den Berg & van Rijsoort, 1993; Vlaeyen, Geurts, Kole-Snijders & Schuerman, 1990). Obviously, self-report measures are vulner- * Corresponding author. E-mail address: p.dejong@dep.unimaas.nl (P.J. de Jong). 0005-7967/00/$ - see front matter  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0005-7967(99)00180-1