Computational Modeling of Self-Referential Processing Reveals Domain General Associations with Adolescent Anxiety Symptoms

What an adolescent thinks about themselves, commonly termed self-referential processing, has significant implications for youth long-term psychological well-being. Self-referential processing plays an important role in anticipatory and reactive processing in social contexts and contributes to symptoms of social anxiety. Previous work examining self-referential processing largely focuses on child and adolescent depression, relying on endorsement and reaction time for positive and negative self-describing adjectives in a self-referential encoding task (SRET). Here, we employ computational methods to interrogate the latent processes underlying choice reaction times to evaluate the fit of several drift–diffusion models of youth SRET performance. A sample of 106 adolescent, aged 12–17 (53% male; M age = 14.49, SD = 1.70) completed the SRET and self-report measures of anxiety and depression. Our results support the utility of modeling the SRET, where the rate of evidence accumulation (i.e., drift rate) during negative self-referential processing was related to social anxiety above-and-beyond mean task performance. Our regression analyses indicated that youth efficiency in processing of self-referential views was domain general to anxiety, highlighting the importance of assessing both social and physiological anxiety symptoms when predicting SRET performance. The computational modeling results revealed that self-referential views are not uniquely related to depression-related constructs but also facets of anxiety.