Developing a Perspective-Taking Task for Social Anxiety

Perspective-taking refers to one's ability to infer one's own and others' mental states. The existing perspective-taking tasks mainly focus on healthy individuals and overlook the potential confounding effect of prompt type. The current study developed a perspective-taking task for social anxiety research by including both ambiguous and unambiguous prompts and a social context. Analysing two community samples with either ambiguous (N = 69) or unambiguous (N = 89) prompts found that both prompts cued self-perspective-taking and other perspective-taking as required. However, while unambiguous prompts cue perspective switching, the ambiguous prompts failed to do so. Thirty-two participants of the two samples completed the tasks with both prompt types and showed no differences in perspective-taking. Findings suggest that the newly developed task measures self-perspective-taking and other perspective-taking as prompted, regardless of prompt type. Furthermore, the unambiguous prompts may be more sensitive and appropriate for measuring perspective switching and offer greater applicability in neural research.