Effects of Looming Cognitive Style and Time Course on Anticipatory Anxiety About an Impending Speech

Abstract

Most prior studies have examined the time course of anxiety leading up to a public speech over a relatively narrow time window. The present study examined this time course over a longer time window within a naturalistic setting of a classroom assignment. A major purpose of the study was to examine the potential moderating effects of the looming cognitive style (LCS, Riskind, Williams, Gessner, Chrosniak, & Cortina, 2000), which assesses cognitive tendencies to perceive ambiguous threats as rapidly escalating and approaching. More specifically, we assessed the time course of anxiety and threat thoughts of 93 college students during a three-week period prior to giving an assigned public speech. Both threat thoughts and anxiety decreased as the day of the speech approached, although anxiety rebounded just before the speech itself. Importantly, the social looming scale interacted with the time course and seemed to moderate the course of anxiety changes. This revealed that it was primarily the participants who were high in social looming who exhibited a rebound in anxiety on the day of the speech. By contrast, the participants who were low in social looming did not show a rebound and continued to decrease in anxiety. Of note, while social looming predicted subsequent levels of anxiety, the reciprocal effect was also found, such that anxiety predicted subsequent levels of social looming. The present novel findings suggest that social looming and anxiety may potentially mutually reinforce each other in a snowballing cascade.