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, 1988) have hypothesized that self-consciousness, broadly conceptualized as a dispositional tendency to focus attention on oneself, is relevant to the phenomenology of social phobia. Unlike the most commonly used measure of this construct, the Self-Consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Scheier & Buss, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522-527, 1975), Christensen's (Personality and Individual Differences, 3, 177-188, 1982) Scale of Maladaptive Self-Consciousness (SCONS) explicitly emphasizes the dysfunctional aspects of self-consciousness. The current investigation evaluated the relationship of maladaptive self-consciousness, assessed via the SCONS, to social phobia. Social phobics exhibited higher levels of maladaptive self-consciousness than nonanxious subjects. Among social phobics, maladaptive self-consciousness was associated with greater social anxiety, more avoidance of feared situations, greater severity of phobic symptoms, and several types of cognitive biases, including underestimation of performance quality within social contexts and maladaptive attributional style. Thus, Christensen's (1982) refined notion of self-consciousness, which emphasizes the construct's dysfunctional aspects, appears to be of theoretical and practical relevance to the study of social phobia.