His record was a model of negative consistency.
RT overlapped with negative consistency and frequency effects in left IFG and anterior insula.
Although the sum of the positive and negative consistency scores should be equal to the total consistency score, the proportion of items in the positive and negative consistency scales will vary across participants.
Scores on each scale range from 0 to 25 with higher scores indicating more positive or negative consistency respectively.
Total consistency scores do not take valence into account, and therefore we constructed separate scores for positive and negative consistency.
Positive consistency involves saying yes to a positive word and no to a negative word; whereas the reverse is true for negative consistency.
For a participant who said yes to every positive word and no to every negative word, the total consistency score would be 25; the positive consistency score would be 25 and the negative consistency score would be 0.
The computerised task included separate measures of positive and negative consistency, and because it did not rely on self-report, it was much less likely to be subject to social desirability biases.
The increased negative consistency observed in Study 2 might contribute to the more stable negative perception of self, which is a feature of Hofmann's (2007) model of social anxiety.
The inclusion of the me not-me task, which is a novel measure of self-consistency that does not rely on self-report and that allowed us to discriminate between positive and negative consistency, is a strength of the second study and contributes to the small evidence base suggesting that uncertainty about the self is characteristic of social anxiety.
As well as reporting lower levels of self-concept clarity on the questionnaire, the high socially anxious participants had lower overall consistency scores, higher negative consistency and lower positive consistency scores, were less confident in their own judgments, and took longer to make decisions about self-descriptive words on the me not-me task compared to low socially anxious participants.
