The mediating role of attentional control between negative automatic thoughts and social anxiety among medical freshmen / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To explore the mediating effect of attentional control between negative automatic thoughts and social anxiety.methods A total of 1 504 college freshmen of medical university were surveyed with the Interaction Anxiety Scale (IAS),the Automatic Thoughts questionnaire (ATQ) and the Attentional Control Scale (ACS).Result sThe scores of IAS,ACS and ATQ of medical freshmen were (39.36±8.15),(53.50±7.48) and (48.93±19.72) respectively.Correlation analysis showed that ATQ total score was significantly positively correlated with IAS total score(r=0.313,P<0.01),ATQ total score was significantly negatively correlated with ACS total score(r=-0.275,P<0.01),and ACS score was significantly negatively correlated with IAS total score(r=-0.455,P<0.01).Mediating effect analysis showed that attentional control partly-mediated the relationship between negative automatic thoughts and social anxiety among medical freshmen (x2/df=1.650,GFI=0.998,AGFI=0.993,RMSEA=0.021),and accounted for 50.8% of the mediating effect.Conclusion Negative automatic thoughts is an important factor which plays direct and indirect roles in social anxiety.Attentional control is the intermediate link between negative automatic thoughts and social anxiety.