Effect of Social Context on the Impact of Coping Self-Statements.

The present study was designed to evaluate the role of a social context in the impact of coping self-statements. It was hypothesized that the control which coping self-statements exert over anxiety-related behaviors would vary to the extent that the self-statements are socially accessible. Speech-anxious college students were randomly assigned to either a control group or to one of two experimental groups. Control subjects received no coping self-statements while subjects in both experimental groups selected the same coping self-statement. The two experimental groups differed only in whether the coping self-statement was apparently known to the experimenter. On self-report measures only the social-context group showed improvement over those of the other two groups. The only difference among the groups on behavioral measures indicated that subjects in the social-context group had followed the coping statement by talking more slowly. The results were interpreted as possibly a function of the social contingencies established by public statements.