THE SCALE OF MALADAPTIVE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS - A VALID AND USEFUL MEASURE IN THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PHOBIA

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.