Abstract :
Keywords Social anxiety; Recognition memory; Social threat stimuli; Old/new effects; ERPs Highlights * For neutral target words, the HSA and LSA participants all did not exhibit significant old/new effects when distracters were threat words. * For threat target words, only LSA participants showed significant old/new effects when distracters were also threat words. * Under the neutral target (NT) condition, the LSA participants exhibited a reversed LPC old/new effect for threat distracter words. * Social anxiety modulates the effect of recognition memory for social threat words. Abstract In this study, the effect of social anxiety on item recognition memory was examined by adopting a study-test paradigm. Participants with high and low social anxiety (31 HSA vs. 30 LSA) memorized neutral target and threat target (NT vs. TT) words while threat distracters were simultaneously presented. The behavioral results did not exhibit group differences in recognition performance. The event-related potentials (ERP) results showed that the HSA and LSA participants all did not exhibit significant old/new effects for neutral targets, while only the LSA participants exhibited significant old/new effects for threat targets. For the distracters, the HSA participants did not exhibit evident old/new effects under the NT and TT conditions; while LSA participants showed a reversed LPC old/new effect for the threat distracters under the NT condition. The old/new effects for threat targets were impaired in HSA participants but presented in LSA participants. These findings suggest that social anxiety modulates the effect of recognition memory for social threat words. Author Affiliation: (a) Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, School of Psychology, Capital Normal University, No. 23 Baiduizijia, Fuwaidajie St, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China (b) Department of Nursing, Harbin Medical University, Xinyang Road No.39, Daqing 163319, China (c) Key Laboratory of Human Factors and Ergonomics for State Market Regulation, China National Institute of Standardization, No.4 Zhi Chun Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100191, China * Corresponding author. Article History: Received 8 October 2021; Revised 18 August 2022; Accepted 18 August 2022 Byline: Jianqin Cao (a,b), Feng Si (c), Xiaohuan Li (a), Chunyan Guo [guocy@cnu.edu.cn] (a,*), Xiaodong Yue (a)