In previous works, referential thinking was predicted by clinical and dispositional variables such as social anxiety or vulnerability to depression (Rodríguez-Testal, Senín-Calderón & Fernández-Jiménez, submitted to revision).

We propose to find personality variables to characterize the emergence of referential thinking. We predict a greater referential thinking in subjects with a high sensitivity to punishment and higher scores on social anxiety.

Participants: 366 subjects selected from the general population, 66.6% women, mean age = 33.18 (SD = 12.79).

We used the REF-scale (Lenzenweger et al., 1997) adapted to Spanish language, GHQ-28 (Goldberg, 1996), SPSRQ (Torrubia et al., 2001) and The Revised Self-Consciousness Scale (Scheier & Carver, 1985).

It was applied a cross-sectional design and a correlation method. All the analysis were accepted at p < .05.

The multiple linear regression analysis showed the importance of the clinical variable of depression, public self-consciousness, and sensitivity to reward and punishment as predictors of referential thinking (34% of the variance explained). The discriminant analysis according to scores in referential thinking was significant (Lambda = .87, p = .001). The combination of the above variables correctly classified 85.1% of cases.

Subjects more concerned about how they are perceived by others tend to a greater presence of self-references, although they don’t show a high score in social anxiety. Susceptibility to reward and high vulnerable to punishment are the personality variables that best predicted referential thinking.