Social context and the real-world consequences of social anxiety

Abstract

Social anxiety lies on a continuum, and young adults with elevated symptoms are at risk for developing a range of debilitating psychiatric disorders. Yet, relatively little is known about the factors that govern the hour-by-hour experience and expression of social anxiety in daily life. Here, we used smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to intensively sample emotional experience across different social contexts in the daily lives of 228 young adults selectively recruited to represent a broad spectrum of social anxiety symptoms. Leveraging data from over 11,000 real-world assessments, results highlight the central role of close friends, family members, and romantic partners. The presence of close companions is associated with enhanced mood, yet socially anxious individuals have smaller confidant networks and spend less time with their close companions. Although higher levels of social anxiety are associated with a general worsening of mood, socially anxious individuals appear to derive larger benefits—lower levels of negative affect, anxiety, and depression—from the presence of their closest companions. In contrast, variation in social anxiety was unrelated to the amount of time spent with strangers, co-workers, and acquaintances; and we uncovered no evidence of emotional hypersensitivity to less-familiar individuals. Collectively, these findings provide a framework for understanding the deleterious consequences of social anxiety in emerging adulthood and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.

Thinking of you: Relations between mind‐mindedness, theory of mind, and social anxiety traits in middle childhood and adulthood

“…These results are consistent with existing evidence connecting social anxiety to difficulties in close relationships (e.g., Davila & Beck, 2002; Rodebaugh, Lim, Shumaker, Levinson, & Thompson, 2015; Sparrevohn & Rapee, 2009). For example, one recent ecological momentary assessment study in young adults found that social anxiety traits did not predict the frequency or valence of social interactions with distant social partners, but did relate to decreased time with close friends (Hur et al., in press). Thus, the tendency of those with social anxiety to overly ruminate on others' mental states may be specific to close relationships, perhaps due to the increased availability of relevant social information upon which to reflect.…”

“…Beyond the importance of this comparison to the mind‐mindedness literature, the relationship‐specific nature of mind‐mindedness (e.g., Meins et al., 2014) could reveal different associations between social anxiety and mind‐mindedness for close versus distant partners. One possibility is that individuals who are more socially anxious show increased mind‐mindedness in the context of close relationships, given the increased saliency of these relationships (e.g., Hur et al., in press). Alternatively, close relationships may be more comfortable than distant ones and thus less prone to hypervigilant attention to mental states.…”

Anxiety-related frontocortical activity is associated with dampened stressor reactivity in the real world

“…All procedures were approved by the University of Maryland Institutional Review Board. The sample overlaps that featured in work by our group focused on social anxiety and momentary mood (Hur et al, 2020a) and the basic neurobiology of threat processing (Hur et al, 2020b).…”

“…Next, we used smartphone experience sampling or ‘ecological momentary assessment’ (EMA)—to intensively sample fluctuations in self-reported negative affect and stressor exposure across different real-world contexts. To ensure a broad spectrum of emotional reactivity, subjects were selectively recruited from a pool of 6,594 young adults screened for trait-like individual differences in negative emotionality (Hur et al, 2020a). We focused on ‘emerging adulthood’ because it is a time of profound, often stressful transitions (Shackman et al, 2018).…”

Review of Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies between Number of Confidants and Anxiety/Depressive Symptoms

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