Abstract: Self-focused attention is an attentional bias about one′s own information that produces in the organism. Social anxiety patients′ self-focused attention usually focuses on the ideas, emotions and behaviors generated in social occasion, which is a negative cognitive processing tendency that leads to the maintenance of anxiety symptoms. This paper reviewed the literatures of the theories and the research method of self-focused attention, and the effects of self-focused attention on social anxiety disorder and other mental diseases, so as to provide new ideas for the research of mechanisms such as social anxiety disorder.

Key words: social anxiety, mental disorders, self-focused attention, attentional bias