What determines observer-rated social performance in individuals with social anxiety disorder?

Risk factor patterns define social anxiety subtypes in adolescents with brain and clinical feature differences

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in adolescents. The heterogeneity of both symptoms and etiology is an essential source of difficulties in the treatment and prevention of SAD. The study aimed to identify subtypes of adolescent SAD based on etiology-related phenotype dimensions and examine symptom and brain associations of the subtypes. We used a deeply phenotyped sample (47 phenotype subscales from 13 measures) of adolescents with SAD (n = 196) and healthy controls (n = 109) to extract etiology-relevant risk factors, based on which we identified subtypes of SAD. We compared the subtypes on clinical characteristics and brain morphometrics and functional connectivity, and examined subtype-specific links between risk factors, brain aberrance, and clinical characteristics. We identified six etiology-relevant risk factors and two subtypes of adolescent SAD. One subtype showed mainly elevated negative emotionality trait and coping style and diminished positive emotionality trait and coping style, while the other additionally had significantly high environmental risk factors, more severe impairments in social functioning, and significant abnormalities in brain structure and function. There were subtype-specific links between the risk factor profiles, brain aberrance, and clinical characteristics. The finding suggests two etiology-based subtypes of adolescent SAD, providing novel insights to the diversity of pathological pathways and precise intervention strategies.

Social anxiety is related to reduced face gaze during a naturalistic social interaction

BACKGROUND

Social anxiety has long been related to reduced eye contact, and this feature is seen as a causal and a maintaining factor of social anxiety disorder. The present research adds to the literature by investigating the relationship between social anxiety and visual avoidance of faces in a reciprocal face-to-face conversation, while taking into account two aspects of conversations as potential moderating factors: conversational role and level of intimacy.

METHOD

Eighty-five female students (17-25 years) completed the Leibowitz Social Anxiety Scale and had a face-to-face getting-acquainted conversation with a female confederate. We alternated conversational role (talking versus listening) and manipulated intimacy of the topics (low versus high). Participants' gaze behavior was registered with Tobii eye-tracking glasses. Three dependent measures were extracted regarding fixations on the face of the confederate: total duration, proportion of fixations, and mean duration.

RESULTS

The results revealed that higher levels of social anxiety were associated with reduced face gaze on all three measures. The relation with total fixation duration was stronger for low intimate topics. The relation with mean fixation duration was stronger during listening than during speaking.

CONCLUSION

The results highlight the importance of studying gaze behavior in a naturalistic social interaction.

Adaptation and validation of two annotation scales for assessing social skills in a corpus of multimodal collaborative interactions

Context

Behavioral observation scales are important for understanding and assessing social skills. In the context of collaborative problem-solving (CPS) skills, considered essential in the 21st century, there are no validated scales in French that can be adapted to different CPS tasks. The aim of this study is to adapt and validate, by annotating a new video corpus of dyadic interactions that we have collected, two observational scales allowing us to qualitatively assess CPS skills: the Social Performance Rating Scale (SPRS) and the Social Skills of Collaboration Scale (SSC).

Method

The construct validity of these two scales was assessed by exploratory factor analysis and inter-item correlations. We also checked inter-judge agreement using inter-class correlation coefficients. Internal consistency was determined using Cronbach's alpha and convergent and divergent validity by assessing correlations between the two scales and measures of depression and alexithymia. Finally, the discriminative properties of the two scales were analyzed by comparing the scores obtained by a group of anxious individuals and a non-anxious control group.

Results

The results show that our two scales have excellent inter-item correlations. Internal consistency is excellent (alpha SPRS =0.90; SSC = 0.93). Inter-rater agreement ranged from moderate to high. Finally, convergent validity was significant with the alexithymia scale, as was divergent validity with the depression scale. Anxious individuals had lower scores on both scales than non-anxious individuals.

Conclusion

Both scales show good psychometric properties for assessing social skills relevant to different collaborative tasks. They also identify individuals with difficulties in social interaction. Thus, they could allow monitoring the effectiveness of training social skills useful in CPS.

Assessing Performance on an Evaluated Speaking Task

Abstract. Coping with social stress involves cognitive perceptions and the activation of several physiological mechanisms. Our main purpose was to examine how psychological factors such as cognitive appraisal, and particularly self-efficacy, may affect psychophysiological reactivity to social stress and young people’s performance on an evaluated speaking task. Thirty-five university students (18 men and 17 women) were exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and a control condition in a counterbalanced order. Self-efficacy, several dimensions of trait anxiety related to social evaluation, and changes in state anxiety were assessed. Additionally, heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) were analyzed by means of R-R and r-MSSD parameters, respectively. The results indicate that a positive self-assessment of their own ability to overcome a social threat was related to the predominance of vagal tone and better performance. However, cardiac reactivity was not related to the quality of the performance displayed. In addition, some dimensions of trait anxiety, such as cognitive anxiety and test evaluation anxiety, were negatively associated with self-efficacy and performance. These findings emphasize the relevance of self-efficacy, a key component of cognitive appraisal, in explaining psychophysiological reactivity to social stress. Furthermore, they highlight the importance of some personality characteristics, such as social evaluation anxiety, in explaining performance in specifically related stressful situations, regardless of autonomic activation.

Impact of Social Anxiety on Behavioral Mimicry During a Social Interaction With a Confederate

Behavioral mimicry, the unintentional alteration of one's behavior to match that of an interaction partner, leads to many positive outcomes such as increased rapport. The current study examined the influence of social anxiety on mimicry behavior during a social interaction. Participants (N = 84), pre-screened for low and high social anxiety, participated in a face-to-face interaction with a confederate. Individuals with high social anxiety were less likely to mimic the movements of the confederate than individuals with low social anxiety. However, reduced mimicry behavior was only found during the portion of the experiment in which the confederate's movements were not planned, and not during the portion of the experiment in which the confederate made planned movements. Further, individuals with increased self-focused attention were also less likely to mimic during the portion of the experiment where the confederate's movements were not planned. Overall, results provide partial evidence to support the notion of reduced mimicry among individuals with high social anxiety. Future research can further evaluate the contexts in which those with high levels of social anxiety may mimic less, as well as factors that may play a role (e.g., self-focused attention), to enhance the probability of a positive interpersonal interaction for these individuals.

Safety Behaviors in Adults With Social Anxiety: Review and Future Directions

Safety behaviors are considered an important factor in the maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Safety behaviors are typically employed by socially anxious individuals to reduce anxiety in feared social situations. However, by preventing individuals with social anxiety from gathering evidence that would disconfirm their maladaptive beliefs about social situations, the use of safety behaviors ultimately maintains social anxiety over time. Twenty years ago, Wells and colleagues (1995) demonstrated that use of safety behaviors diminishes the efficacy of exposure treatment for SAD, suggesting that reduction in the use of safety behaviors during exposure can enhance treatment response. Research on safety behaviors has expanded considerably since Wells et al.'s seminal publication, and our understanding of the role safety behaviors may play in the maintenance of social anxiety has grown in breadth and depth. In this paper, we present a detailed review of the published research on safety behaviors relevant to social anxiety and social-anxiety-related processes. Finally, we evaluate the impact of safety behaviors on the outcome of treatment for SAD, and we look to the literature on safety behaviors in other anxiety disorders to inform our understanding of use of safety behaviors during exposure and to facilitate future research in SAD.

Deficits in joint action explain why socially anxious individuals are less well liked

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Socially anxious individuals elicit less positive reactions from interlocutors than non-anxious individuals, but evidence for a distinctive social anxiety linked behaviour deficit to explain this finding has been sparse. We investigated whether socially anxious individuals engage less in joint action--a process which promotes rapport and usually arises spontaneously between conversation partners when they actively attend to the conversation.

METHODS

In Study 1, participants with high fear of negative evaluation, and low fear of negative evaluation conversed with a peer. Study 2 simulated the cognitive impact of anxiety-linked threat focus in non-anxious participants via a partial distraction task and measured the social consequences.

RESULTS

In Study 1, listeners with high fear of negative evaluation made fewer collaborative contributions to a partner's anecdote (an index of joint action). In Study 2, non-anxious distracted listeners showed the same behavioural pattern (fewer collaborative responses) and were less well-liked by their conversation partners, compared to non-distracted listeners.

LIMITATIONS

We coded for only one marker of joint action. Future research should identify further indices of connectedness between partners. In addition, both studies were conducted with small groups of university students, and future research should be conducted on larger samples selected on the basis of social anxiety, not fear of negative evaluation alone.

CONCLUSIONS

Together, these findings indicate that socially anxious individuals engage less in the shared task of conversation, and this behaviour attracts less positive responses from conversation partners.

Try to find me: social anxiety and peer first impressions

Following initial interactions, some people are less willing to pursue ongoing contact with socially anxious individuals than with those who are not socially anxious. To better understand this process, we conducted two studies that examined peers' first impressions of target individuals. Unacquainted individuals (N=104 and 114) participated in round robin, unstructured interactions in groups of 3 to 10 and then rated each partner and themselves on items reflecting the Big Five personality dimensions. The ratings were analyzed according to Biesanz's (2010) social accuracy model of interpersonal perception, which distinguishes the positivity from the accuracy of social judgments. Study 1 revealed that perceivers did not view socially anxious targets more negatively or as less likable than non-socially anxious targets but were less able to recognize their unique personality features. Study 2 replicated those findings and indicated that perceivers' difficulties recognizing socially anxious targets' unique features were not due to negative biases in the socially anxious targets' self-ratings or to general psychological maladjustment. The findings are consistent with cognitive models, which underscore the role of self-concealment in social anxiety disorder.

More than a face: a unified theoretical perspective on nonverbal social cue processing in social anxiety

Processing of nonverbal social cues (NVSCs) is essential to interpersonal functioning and is particularly relevant to models of social anxiety. This article provides a review of the literature on NVSC processing from the perspective of social rank and affiliation biobehavioral systems (ABSs), based on functional analysis of human sociality. We examine the potential of this framework for integrating cognitive, interpersonal, and evolutionary accounts of social anxiety. We argue that NVSCs are uniquely suited to rapid and effective conveyance of emotional, motivational, and trait information and that various channels are differentially effective in transmitting such information. First, we review studies on perception of NVSCs through face, voice, and body. We begin with studies that utilized information processing or imaging paradigms to assess NVSC perception. This research demonstrated that social anxiety is associated with biased attention to, and interpretation of, emotional facial expressions (EFEs) and emotional prosody. Findings regarding body and posture remain scarce. Next, we review studies on NVSC expression, which pinpointed links between social anxiety and disturbances in eye gaze, facial expressivity, and vocal properties of spontaneous and planned speech. Again, links between social anxiety and posture were understudied. Although cognitive, interpersonal, and evolutionary theories have described different pathways to social anxiety, all three models focus on interrelations among cognition, subjective experience, and social behavior. NVSC processing and production comprise the juncture where these theories intersect. In light of the conceptualizations emerging from the review, we highlight several directions for future research including focus on NVSCs as indexing reactions to changes in belongingness and social rank, the moderating role of gender, and the therapeutic opportunities offered by embodied cognition to treat social anxiety.

Self-referential and anxiety-relevant information processing in subclinical social anxiety: an fMRI study

The fear of negative evaluation is one of the hallmark features of social anxiety. Behavioral evidence thus far largely supports cognitive models which postulate that information processing biases in the face of socially relevant information are a key factor underlying this widespread phobia. So far only one neuroimaging study has explicitly focused on the fear of negative evaluation in social anxiety where the brain responses of social phobics were compared to healthy participants during the processing of self-referential relative to other-referential criticism, praise or neutral information. Only self-referential criticism led to stronger activations in emotion-relevant regions of the brain, such as the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortices (mPFC), in the social phobics. The objective of the current study was to determine whether these findings could be extended to subclinical social anxiety. In doing so, the specificity of this self-referential bias was also examined by including both social and non-social (physical illness-related) threat information as well as a highly health anxious control group in the experimental paradigm. The fMRI findings indicated that the processing of emotional stimuli was accompanied by activations in the amygdala and the ventral mPFC, while self-referential processing was associated with activity in regions such as the mPFC, posterior cingulate and temporal poles. Despite the validation of the paradigm, the results revealed that the previously reported behavioral and brain biases associated with social phobia could not be unequivocally extended to subclinical social anxiety. The divergence between the findings is explored in detail with reference to paradigm differences and conceptual issues.

Internal and external attention in speech anxiety

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Cognitive models of social phobia propose that socially anxious individuals engage in heightened self-focused attention. Evidence for this assumption was provided by dot probe and feedback tasks measuring attention and reactions to internal cues. However, it is unclear whether similar patterns of attentional processing can be revealed while participants actually engage in a social situation. The current study used a novel paradigm, simultaneously measuring attention to internal and external stimuli in anticipation of and during a speech task.

METHODS

Participants with speech anxiety and non-anxious controls were asked to press a button in response to external or internal probes, while giving a speech on a controversial topic in front of an audience. The external probe consisted of a LED attached to the head of one spectator and the internal probe was a light vibration, which ostensibly signaled changes in participants' pulse or skin conductance.

RESULTS

The results indicate that during speech anticipation, high speech anxious participants responded significantly faster to internal probes than low speech anxious participants, while during the speech no differences were revealed between internal and external probes.

LIMITATIONS

Generalization of our results is restricted to speech anxious individuals.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results provide support for the pivotal role of self-focused attention in anticipatory social anxiety. Furthermore, they provide a new framework for understanding interaction effects of internal and external attention in anticipation of and during actual social situations.