Background: Clark and Wells’ cognitive model of social anxiety proposes that socially anxious individuals have negative expectations of performance prior to a social event, focus their attention predominantly on themselves and on their negative self-evaluations during an event, and use this negative self-processing to infer that other people are judging them harshly. Aims: The present study tested these propositions. Method: The study used a community sample of 161 adolescents aged 14–18 years. The participants gave a speech in front of a pre-recorded audience acting neutrally, and participants were aware that the projected audience was pre-recorded. Results: As expected, participants with higher levels of social anxiety had more negative performance expectations, higher self-focused attention, and more negative perceptions of the audience. Negative performance expectations and self-focused attention were found to mediate the relationship between social anxiety and audience perception. Conclusions: The findings support Clark and Wells’ cognitive model of social anxiety, which poses that socially anxious individuals have distorted perceptions of the responses of other people because their perceptions are coloured by their negative thoughts and feelings.

Recent research indicates the apparent paradox that social anxiety may be associated with both self-focused attention and selective attention to external social threat cues. A naturalistic paradigm was designed to explore both processes. High and low socially anxious individuals were asked to make a speech to a monitor displaying six people whom they believed to be watching them live. Two audience members exhibited only positive behaviours, two only neutral ones and two only negative behaviours. In contrast to the low social anxiety group who selectively discriminated positive audience members, the high social anxiety group selectively discriminated the negative individuals, yet they were no more accurate at discriminating the negative behaviours the audience members had performed and they reported more self-focused attention than the low social anxiety group. The effects remained while covarying for differences in dysphoria. The results indicate that socially anxious individuals base their judgements of being disapproved by others on limited processing of their social environment.

Some studies suggest that self-focus contributes to the onset of depression. A new cogitive model of depression, the three-phase model of self-focus and depression, is presented here to explain the mechanism of the onset and maintenance of depression. In this model, the relationship between self-focus and the course of depression is divided into three phases: (1) initiation, (2) operation, and (3) maintenance. Previous studies examining the relationship between self-focus and depression are reviewed, within the framework of the model: (1) studies investigating situations that will initiate self-focus; (2) studies examining the effects of self-focus on behaviour, cognition, and affect; and (3) studies examining the duration of self-focusing. The model is then presented and propositions derived from it are outlined. Finally, suggestions are made for preventing depression, for recovery from it and for the scope of application of the model.