308 KROSS ET AL asked to think about their feelings conce ning an n of t Following the experiment ma articipants answe he following ques do you gth re er the p ngpant spoke and feeln about the overly brie f nor long-v 09 created a measure of overall performand by sum Pha valuation task Subs quently.the 205 scores on these dimensions (a =.80:A tion partner.whowasin fact a confederate. analyses indicated that scores on the nerv Glass et al.,1982;Kashdan&Rob 2006)the confederate i 4 Phase 7:Po . Par The in action be when the new sat nally,participants were for Results explo whether the manipu analyses.Four participants in each condition debriefing,and four because of protoc s (eo the confed did not follo he room here today Thres sation during the first 30s did not differ by When the experimenter retumed,he or cted,related to several of th (participan aven't". What is F.0.00.73. 3.80h 0.0:o- 3.80 and dis ed on the san ample tests indicated the 中aa on a on two dimensions.First,they rated how nervous the participantassigned to a first-person (n
48) or non-first-person (n
49) condition using instructions that were virtually identical to those used in Study 1. The main difference was that participants were asked to think about their feelings concerning an upcoming anxiety-provoking event (rather than a past experience). Following these instructions, participants reflected over their thoughts and feelings alone for 3 min. Phase 5: Manipulation check and preinteraction anxiety. Following the experimental manipulation, participants answered the following questions, “How well do you feel you followed the speech preparation instructions” (1
not at all well, 5
perfectly well) and “To what extent did you use the first-person pronouns I and me (or non-first-person pronouns you and your own name) to refer to yourself when you were working through your thoughts and feelings about the upcoming conversation (1
not at all, 5
exclusively). Scores on these questions were averaged to create a manipulation check index (
.68; M
3.79, SD
0.70). Next, participants rated their anxiety again, using the same question that was administered prior to the manipulation (M
2.84, SD
0.97). Phase 6: Social evaluation task. Subsequently, the experi￾menter introduced the participant to a new experimenter and their interaction partner, who was in fact a confederate. Prior research indicates that opposite sex interactions are more anxiety provoking than same sex interactions, especially for socially anxious people (e.g., Turner et al., 1986). Therefore, following prior research (e.g., Burgio, Merluzzi, & Pryor, 1986; J. Clark & Arkowitz, 1975; Glass et al., 1982; Kashdan & Roberts, 2006), the confederate in this study was always male. Both the new experimenter and confederate were blind to condition. Unstructured interaction. The interaction began when the new experimenter and confederate entered the room and sat across from the participant. The experimenter told the participant that he or she had to leave the room to calibrate the cameras and would return shortly. The participant was given no instructions about how to interact with the confederate during this period. We included this unstructured interaction period to explore whether the manipula￾tion influenced participants’ tendencies to spontaneously initiate conversation with their partner. Confederates were instructed not to initiate conversation for the first 30 s. After an initial silence of 30 s, the confederate initiated contact by saying, “It wasn’t easy to find the room here today.” Three condition-blind raters coded whether participants initiated conversation during the first 30 s (intraclass correlation [ICC]
1). Structured interaction. When the experimenter returned, he or she presented the participant and the confederate with instructions for the social interaction. Following the procedure used by Me￾leshko and Alden (1993), participants were given a list of topics to talk about (e.g., “What have you always wanted to try but haven’t?”; “What is your biggest pet peeve?”). The experimenter instructed them to take turns selecting and answering questions from this list until they had both answered four questions. The confederate always began the exchange and disclosed on the same four questions with all participants. Confederates’ responses were scripted so that the content and delivery of their disclosures was consistent. The experimenter left the room prior to the initiation of the conversation and returned after the conversation was over. Three judges rated participants’ performance during this phase on two dimensions. First, they rated how nervous the participant was (1
below average level of nervousness, 5
above average level of nervousness; ICC
.73; M
2.87, SD
0.78). Second, they rated participants’ overall performance using a modified version of the Social Performance Rating Scale (Fydrich, Chamb￾less, Perry, Buergener, & Beazley, 1998)—a behavioral assess￾ment of social performance designed for social phobia. Specifi￾cally, judges coded participants’ behavior along the following four dimensions using a 5-point scale (1
poor, 5
excellent): gaze, vocal quality, speech length, and discomfort (ICC
.73).4 Gaze refers to whether the participant made appropriate eye contact with the confederate. Vocal quality refers to whether the participant spoke clearly and varied her vocal tone in an engaging manner. Length refers to whether the participant spoke for an appropriate amount of time when answering the questions (i.e., neither being overly brief nor long-winded) and lacked awkward pauses. Dis￾comfort refers to whether the participant showed verbal (e.g., speech dysfluencies) and nonverbal (e.g., self-manipulative behav￾iors like hair twirling, facial touching, and so on) indicators of anxiety during the interaction. Following Fydrich et al. (1998), we created a measure of overall performance by summing partici￾pants’ scores on these dimensions (
.80; M
13.10, SD
2.05). Preliminary analyses indicated that scores on the nervousness and overall performance indexes were highly correlated. There￾fore, we collapsed them to create a composite behavioral index of social interaction performance after reverse scoring the nervous￾ness scale and then standardizing scores on each measure (
.84). Phase 7: Postinteraction anxiety. Participants rated their anx￾iety at the end of the interaction using the same question they completed earlier (M
1.81, SD
0.92). Phase 8: Debriefing. Finally, participants were debriefed for suspicion and compensated. Results Preliminary analyses. Four participants in each condition were excluded—four because they suspected that their partner was a confederate and/or inferred the study aims during the funneled debriefing, and four because of protocol errors (e.g., the confed￾erate did not follow protocol)—leaving 89 participants, 44 in the first-person group and 45 in the non-first-person group. Exclusions did not differ by condition, 2 (1)
0.00, p
.98. The groups did not differ on premanipulation anxiety, t(86)
0.54, p
.590, or trait social anxiety, t(87)
0.61, p
.541. Both of these variables were, as expected, related to several of the dependent variables (see Table 1). Therefore, they were included as covariates. Degrees of freedom vary slightly across analyses due to missing data. Manipulation check. There was no effect of condition on the manipulation check, F(1, 84)
0.00, p
.973, p 2
.000 (first-person: M
3.80, SE
0.10; non-first-person: M
3.80, SE
0.10), indicating that both groups followed the instructions equally well. It should be noted that one-sample t tests indicated that the mean manipulation check score for each group was sig￾nificantly greater than the midpoint of the manipulation check 4 We did not include the conversational flow category because the structured nature of the interaction did not allow us to code this dimension. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 308 KROSS ET AL.