Abstract

This study explored the effects of detached mindfulness (DM) and the attention training technique (ATT) on cognitive fac- tors and anxiety symptoms in individuals with social anxiety. Participants (n =61) were randomly assigned to the DM (n =21), ATT (n =20), or control (n =20) group and received brief interventions for four days. On the fifth day, all partici- pants completed a speech task. Multilevel linear modeling was used to examine whether the interventions produced change over the five-day period, followed by multiple mediation analyses using slopes derived from the multilevel models. The re- sults indicated that both the DM and ATT groups significantly increased decentering and decreased self-focused attention (SFA) across the five days, with DM showing steeper slopes than the ATT for both variables. In contrast, anxiety symptoms decreased to a greater extent in the ATT group. Mediation analyses indicated that DM was associated with lower social anxi- ety only through decentering, whereas ATT was associated with lower social anxiety through both decentering and SFA, se- quentially. These findings suggest that although DM and the ATT share decentering as a common mechanism, they may dif- ferentially influence cognitive and affective pathways in reducing social anxiety.