Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by cognitive biases that impair emotional information processing. This study examines how acute social stress affects working memory (WM) updating in socially anxious individuals using an emotional 2-back task. A 2×2 factorial design (N = 137) categorized participants into socially anxious (SA) and non-anxious (NSA) groups, further divided into stressed and control conditions. Acute stress was induced via speech anticipation, and subjective stress ratings were recorded. Mixed- effects modelling revealed independent negative effects of both social anxiety and acute stress on WM updating, including reduced accuracy, increased false alarms, lower discriminability (d-prime), and increased inverse efficiency score. Notably, disgusted facial expressions enhanced task efficiency under stress. Findings suggest stress-related cognitive deficits in social anxiety are additive rather than interactive, highlighting potential targets for intervention. This study contributes to understanding emotion-cognition interactions and extends research to understudied cultural contexts.