Validation of the Sentence Interpretation Questionnaire II: A Test for Interpretive Bias

The various ways people process information from the social environment (cognitive bias) ultimately dictates one’s emotional reaction and behaviors in response to social cues. This processing of social cues, however, can become biased leading to specific cognitive and emotional vulnerability and social anxiety. One method to assess biased information processing is via ambiguous social situations that can be interpreted in both threatening and non-threatening manners (e.g., While you are talking, the store clerk thinks that you are “stupid”/”likeable”). Research suggests that this interpretive bias of ambiguous situations is related to social anxiety. Cognitive biases, such as the interpretation bias, have been used to measure information processing in those with specific anxiety symptoms and in depression. The objective of this study was to test the validity of the Sentence Interpretation Questionnaire II (SIQ-II; Huppert, unpublished), a measure of social interpretive bias. Specifically, we examined the internal consistency of the SIQ-II as well as the convergent validity (i.e., high correlation with social anxiety measures) and divergent validity (i.e., low correlation with other symptoms) of the SIQ-II.