The self-reference effect in memory: an implicit way to assess affective self-representations in social anxiety.

This study was designed to assess, through the self-reference effect in memory, whether affective self-representations were modulated by the retrieval conditions and the severity of social anxiety. Three groups (high socially anxious, low socially anxious and non-anxious) were compared on a self-referential task that involved encoding affective trait adjectives under three conditions: self-reference encoding, encoding with reference to the perception of self by others, and other-reference encoding. Memory for trait adjectives was tested on both a free recall task and a Remember/Know/Guess recognition task.