Explicit and implicit memory bias in social phobia. The role of subdiagnostic type

Fourty-five patients with social phobia and 45 normal controls were compared on explicit memory (cued recall) and implicit memory (word stem completion) for positive, neutral, social threat, and physical threat words. Although there were no significant differences between the social phobics and the normal controls, the subgroup of patients with non-generalized social phobia showed an implicit memory bias for social threat words. The results are discussed in terms of a critical analysis of the concept of implicit memory bias, which is operationalized as the difference between a bias on primed and unprimed words, and where the latter represents a ''baseline bias''. In the present study, this baseline word completion bias for social threat words showed a strong negative correlation (r = -0.72) with the implicit memory bias for social threat words, and showed positive correlations with several psychopathology-related measures among the social phobics. It is suggested that future research should consider results on both implicit memory bias and its corresponding baseline bias. The possibility is discussed that implicit memory bias and baseline bias may serve as indexes of externally and internally generated priming effects, and that the relative contributions of external and internal priming may differ in different subtypes of social phobia. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.