Anxious Emotions and Avoidant Behaviors in Individuals with High Social Anxiety: Self- vs. Other- Viewpoints
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Shim, Chiew-Lin
Abstract
According to cognitive theory, attentional and interpretational biases of social interaction cues may lead to the development and maintainance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Clark and Wells (1995) proposed self-focused attention and safety behaviors as important factors in SAD. Socially anxious individuals tended to be more objective when interpreting other-related social events, but more negative when interpreting self-related social events. Rapee and Heimberg (1997) proclaimed that, besides negative self-focused attention, socially anxious individuals tended to attend to negative feedbacks in social situations. Weeks, et, al. (2008) proposed that fear of positive evaluation could be another core of social anxiety because socially anxious individual have negative self image and worry the cost of positive evaluations. However, the mechanism of valences especially positive evaluation and self-related perspective have not been investigated. This study therefore aimed to explore anxious emotion and avoidant behaviours in response to different viewpoints and valences of evaluations in order to increase our understanding of the psychopathology and clinical intervention of social anxiety.
Recruited undergraduate students were divided into high socially anxious (n = 157) and control group (n = 157) based on their social anxious intensity. A measure with positive and negative evaluations of social scenarios was designed. Participants were asked to rate their anxious emotions and avoidant behaviours on each scenario by using self- and other-viewpoints. It was hypothesized that: 1) significant differences of anxious emotions and avoidant behaviours would be noted between socially anxious and control groups when using different viewpoints to respond to social evaluation with different valences; 2) to respond to positive evaluation, socially anxious group using self- viewpoint rather than other- viewpoint may display greater anxious emotions and avoidant behaviours, while no difference will be shown between self-viewpoint and other- viewpoint in control group; 3) to respond to negative evaluation, socially anxious group using self- viewpoint rather than other- viewpoint may display greater anxious emotions and avoidant behaviours, while reverse results will be expected in control group.
The results support that: 1) in socially anxious group, greater anxious emotions and avoidant behaviours were shown in response to positive evaluation when using self- viewpoint than other-viewpoint; in control group, however, no differences were resulted. 2) in socially anxious group, greater anxious emotions and avoidant behaviours were also shown in response to negative evaluation when using self- viewpoint than other- viewpoint; in control group, however, reverse pattern was resulted. Results revealed that socially anxious individuals display interpretational bias to self-related social cues. The findings support that fear of positive evaluation may play an important role in the psychopathology of social anxiety. Based on these results, implication for clinical intervention and future research are discussed.
Subjects
socially anxiety
fear of positive evaluation
fear of negative evaluation
self-viewpoint
other-viewpoint
Type
thesis
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