Extant research has demonstrated that people with social anxiety exhibit attentional bias grounded in their metacognitive strategies when they are faced with internal and external threat stimuli. Based on this finding, the current study developed the Metacognition about Focused Attention in Social Anxiety Questionnaire (MFAQ) and investigated its reliability and validity.

Social anxiety disorder has two critical attentional processes, self-focused attention (SFA) and other-focused attention (OFA). These biases are caused by two psychological aspects: Strategies known as positive metacognitive beliefs and negative metacognitive beliefs. A method in which the occurrence of OFA is predicted by eye movement has been proposed. However, few studies have investigated the relationship between SFA and changes of eye movement. The relationship between the degree of SFA and OFA during speech and eye movements was investigated in this study, based on the psychosomatic relationship in which eye movements reflect psychological changes.