Gs. Makris et Rg. Heimberg, THE SCALE OF MALADAPTIVE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS - A VALID AND USEFUL MEASURE IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PHOBIA, Personality and individual differences, 19(5), 1995, pp. 731-740
Hope and Heimberg (Journal of Personality Assessment, 52, 626-639, 198
8) have hypothesized that self-consciousness, broadly conceptualized a
s a dispositional tendency to focus attention on oneself, is relevant
to the phenomenology of social phobia. Unlike the most commonly used m
easure of this construct, the Self-Consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Sc
heier & Buss, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522-5
27, 1975), Christensen's (Personality and Individual Differences, 3, 1
77-188, 1982) Scale of Maladaptive Self-Consciousness (SCONS) explicit
ly emphasizes the dysfunctional aspects of self-consciousness. The cur
rent investigation evaluated the relationship of maladaptive self-cons
ciousness, assessed via the SCONS, to social phobia. Social phobics ex
hibited higher levels of maladaptive self-consciousness than nonanxiou
s subjects. Among social phobics, maladaptive self-consciousness was a
ssociated with greater social anxiety, more avoidance of feared situat
ions, greater severity of phobic symptoms, and several types of cognit
ive biases, including underestimation of performance quality within so
cial contexts and maladaptive attributional style. Thus, Christensen's
(1982) refined notion of self-consciousness, which emphasizes the con
struct's dysfunctional aspects, appears to be of theoretical and pract
ical relevance to the study of social phobia.