Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to compare individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) with those with taijin kyofushe(TK; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) , in terms of their bias when interpreting others' ambiguous social behavior. Undergraduate students (N =592) were asked to complete the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (FNE) and the Taijin Kyofusho Scale (TKS). When the students (N = 40) whose scores met our criterion participated in a speech task to investigate their interpretation bias, 14 of them scored high on both the FNE and the TKS, 7 scored high on the FNE but low on the TKS, 3 scored low on the FNE but high on the TKS, and 13 scored low on both scales. During the speech task, a confederate engaged in ambiguous behavior selected through pilot studies. The results indicated that the participants with high scores on both scales interpreted the confederate's ambiguous behavior more negatively than did the participants with low scores. No significant differences were found between the individuals with social anxiety disorder and those with taijin kyofusho from the viewpoint of interpretation bias for others' ambiguous social behavior.
