Emotion beliefs in social anxiety disorder: Associations with stress, anxiety, and well‐being

Abstract

Dysfunctional beliefs play an important role in the aetiology and maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Despite this-and the heightened salience of emotion in SAD-little is known about SAD patients' beliefs about whether emotions can be influenced or changed. The current study examined these emotion beliefs in patients with SAD and in non-clinical participants. Overall, patients were more likely to hold entity beliefs (i.e., viewing emotions as things that cannot be changed). However, this group difference in emotion beliefs varied by emotion domain. Specifically, SAD patients more readily held entity beliefs about their own emotions and anxiety than about emotions in general. By contrast, non-clinical participants more readily held entity beliefs about emotions in general than about their own. Results also indicated that even when controlling for social anxiety severity, patients with SAD differed in their beliefs about their emotions, and these beliefs explained unique variance in perceived stress, trait anxiety, negative affect, and self-esteem.

Emotion Beliefs and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder

“…Research with the IBSA scale indicates it displays high internal consistency in both non-clinical subjects (NC) and patients with SAD (NC a ¼ 0.81, SAD a ¼ 0.92). Moreover, the IBSA displays good convergent and discriminant validity, predicting stress and anxiety, self-esteem, and negative affect in patients with SAD (De Castella et al, 2014). All scale ranges and reliabilities at baseline and post-CBT are reported in Tables 1 and 2.…”

“…Beliefs about the malleability of anxiety were assessed using the four-item Implicit Beliefs About Social Anxiety Scale (De Castella et al, 2014). Based on traditional implicit theories of emotion measures (De Castella et al, 2013;Tamir et al, 2007), the implicit beliefs about social anxiety (IBSA) scale contains two items assessing incremental beliefs-'If I want to, I can change the social anxiety that I have', 'I can learn to control my social anxiety'-and two items measuring entity beliefs-'The truth is, I have very little control over my social anxiety', 'No matter how hard I try, I can't really change the social anxiety that I have'.…”

“…Implicit theories also reflect broad beliefs about one's capacity for change, and in this way differ from self-efficacy beliefs, which typically assess perceived competences, and 'operative capabilities as of now', rather than potential capabilities or expected future (Bandura, 1997, p. 44). In the context of social anxiety, recent work examining beliefs about emotions found that SAD patients were more likely than healthy individuals to believe that their emotions and anxiety could not be changed or controlled (De Castella et al, 2014). Entity beliefs about emotions also predicted more severe stress and anxiety, lower self-esteem, and poorer overall satisfaction with life.…”

“…We chose to focus on beliefs about anxiety, as these beliefs may be more strongly associated with clinical outcomes than general beliefs about emotion in patients with SAD (De Castella et al, 2014).…”

Data versus Spock: lay theories about whether emotion helps or hinders

“…Negatively evaluating emotional reactions may also lead to using less effective strategies to down-regulate emotion, such as suppression or experiential avoidance, both of which have been implicated in psychopathology (Aldao et al, 2010;Kneeland et al, 2016). Consistent with this view, past research shows that believing that emotion hijacks behaviour is associated with anxiety; believing that emotion constrains behaviour is associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression (De Castella et al, 2014;Veilleux et al, 2015). These findings suggest that it would be fruitful to assess whether hinder theory endorsement prospectively predicts symptoms of psychopathology and whether help theory endorsement is protective.…”