SRP
MBSR resulted in decreased negative and increased positive self-views on the SRP task. This suggests
that training in the mindfulness meditation skills may influence habitual distorted social
self-views that are deeply entrenched in SAD. MBSR emphasizes cultivating an equanimous perspective
toward mental and visceral experience. This perspective is described as a nonevaluative
moment-to-moment awareness and a nonjudgmental metacognitive orientation.
Being able to shift from evaluative to nonevaluative awareness is a psychological skill that
may be related to reductions in negative self-focused rumination. Decreased self-focused attention
may account for the adaptive shift in social self-view in patients with SAD during MBSR.
Changes in negative self-focused attention have been shown to vary as a function of social anxiety
symptom reduction during from pre- to postexposure therapy (Hofmann, 2000). This pattern
of results indicates that a modulation of both cognitive content (i.e., self-focused thoughts) and
cognitive processes (i.e., attention and interpretative biases) may be core mechanisms underlying
the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions for SAD.
Neural Bases of SRP
Baseline neural results demonstrate that both positive and negative SRP in patients with SAD
yielded robust activation of self-processing midline cortical brain regions (Northoff et al., 2006)
and language processing areas (Iacoboni & Wilson, 2006). The apparent greater BOLD response
for positive SRP compared to negative SRP may be due to either greater arousal for the positive
SRP and/or reactivity to the negative social traits during the case condition, thereby resulting
in a smaller difference in BOLD response in the contrast of negative SRP versus case. The
similar pattern during positive and negative SRP at baseline in patients with SAD indicates that
they automatically rely on a specific form of self-focus that recruits brain systems related to a
language-mediated conceptual-analytic mode of evaluation (Farb et al., 2007).