Matching Method to Mind: Personality-Decision Style Profiles and Differential Responsiveness to Defocusing Interventions

This dataset contains experimental data from a study examining how defocusing interventions reduce the focusing illusion—a cognitive bias where individuals disproportionately emphasize salient negative events (e.g., social blunders) when predicting social repercussions, contributing to social anxiety. You may open the .omv file in Jamovi (open source software). The first author being a student and less proficiency in programming, preferred to use Jamovi over RStudio (Author 2 used this to confirm the analysis).

Study Overview
Ninety-seven college students (ages 18-25) participated in a randomized between-subjects experimental design. Participants evaluated eight social blunder scenarios, rating anticipated embarrassment, shame, perceived social costs, and fear of negative judgment under control or defocusing intervention conditions.

Key Findings
Defocusing interventions significantly reduced perceived negative social costs (p = .010, d = 0.54) and negative judgment expectations (p = .004, d = 0.61). Cluster analysis identified three personality-decision style profiles with
differential intervention responsiveness. Analysts (high conscientiousness) showed largest benefits for concrete social cost reduction (d = 0.85); Explorers (high openness/extraversion) for reducing judgment-related anxiety (d = 0.96). Agreeableness moderated effects across profiles.

Dataset Contents
Sample size: N = 97
Study design: Between-subjects experimental design
Age range: 18-25 years
Population: College students
Country: India
IRB approval: Yes
Data de-identification: Complete
Open data: Yes
Group 1= Control, 2=Experimental
Big Five personality traits and decision-making styles, social anxiety symptoms (SPIN), outcome measures, clustering analysis results (K-means and Latent Profile Analysis validation), and descriptive statistics by
condition and profile.

More questions about this research may be directed to Dr Koteshwar Ramesh Rakesh, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi-NCR campus, Ghaziabad – 201003, Uttar Pradesh, India. email: [e-mail].