The Role of False Memory in Social Anxiety and Psychological Resilience: A Network Analysis in Academic Contexts

Abstract

This study applies network analysis to examine the complex relationships among social anxiety subscales, false memory, and psychological resilience in university students. A sample of 184 second-year students in scientific majors was analyzed to identify key psychological factors shaping academic cognition and emotion. The resulting network, with five nodes and eight significant edges, demonstrated moderate sparsity (sparsity index = 0.20), enabling the identification of core pathways without overfitting. Centrality measures consistently revealed anticipatory anxiety as the most influential construct, with the highest scores in betweenness, closeness, strength, and expected influence. This finding highlights anticipatory anxiety’s central role as a bridge between academic social anxiety, workload stress, and memory-related processes, marking it as a primary driver of cognitive-affective dynamics in academic environments. Academic social anxiety also showed strong centrality, emphasizing its impact on students’ immediate emotional responses to academic challenges.

Conversely, false memory and psychological resilience were more peripheral in the network. Their lower betweenness and closeness scores suggest they function more as outcomes or moderators rather than as core causes. Notably, psychological resilience exhibited a negative expected influence, indicating its protective role in buffering the impact of academic stress and anxiety. Academic workload stress, though less connected overall, contributed meaningfully through targeted effects, particularly by intensifying anticipatory anxiety and social evaluative concerns. These insights offer a nuanced framework for developing interventions targeting anticipatory anxiety and academic social anxiety, while enhancing psychological resilience to support student well-being and academic performance in higher education contexts.