The Relationship Between Social Anxiety and Anxious Thinking Styles

The CBM-I intervention is based on the interpretation training paradigm developed by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000). It comprises a series of training scenarios describing different (mostly everyday) socially-relevant situations, structured so they start ambiguously but always have a positive ending. The positive ending is presented as word fragment, which participants are instructure to complete. In about 25% of trials, participants are further requested to respond to comprehension questions about the scenario presented. Each CBM-I session comprises 45 trials presented in 5 blocks of 9 scenarios.

The sham training is in an identical format to the CBM-I training, except that the scenarios are all entirely neutral, with no reference to social situations and no emotional ambiguity.