Words That Sting, Words That Soothe: A Two-Phase Experimental and Norming Study on Emotionally Valenced Word Lists for Social Anxiety in Pakistan

Attentional bias plays a significant role in the maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD), yet culturally validated emotional word lists, with major focus on arousal component crucial in automatic attentional process, remain unavailable for Pakistani populations. Two studies have conducted aimed to develop and validate a set of socially threatening and socially positive words grounded in the cognitive, behavioural, emotional and physiological dimensions of social anxiety. Study 1 comprised the creation of a pool of 400 words, generated through input from five experts and twenty university students with self-reported social anxiety.Words were derived based on diagnostic features of SAD and further evaluated by expert judges for clarity, cultural relevance, and conceptual alignment. The remaining items were rated on valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) by a sample of 150 university students. This process yielded 150 socially threatening and 150 socially positive words with strong VAD differentiation. In Study 2, 100 students with elevated social anxiety scores were randomly assigned to two groups. One group was exposed to socially threatening words and the other to socially positive words. State and trait anxiety levels were measured pre- and post-exposure using a STAI scores. Results revealed a significant increase in state anxiety following threatening word exposure and a significant decrease following positive word exposure. These findings support the emotional potency, construct specificity, and experimental utility of the developed words sets for future attentional bias research in culturally relevant contexts.