Specific interpretation biases as a function of social anxiety and callous-unemotional traits in a community and a clinical adolescent sample

Abstract

Background Threatening and hostile interpretation biases are seen as causal and maintaining mechanisms of childhood anxiety and aggression, respectively. However, it is unclear whether these interpretation biases are specific to distinct problems or whether they are general psychopathological phenomena. The specificity versus pervasiveness of interpretation biases could also differ depending on mental health status. Therefore, in the current study, we investigated whether social anxiety and callous-unemotional (CU) traits were uniquely related to threatening and hostile interpretation biases, respectively, in both a community and a clinical sample of adolescents. Methods A total of 161 adolescents between 10 to 15 years of age participated. The community sample consisted of 88 participants and the clinical sample consisted of 73 inpatients with a variety of psychological disorders. Social anxiety and CU-traits were assessed with self-report questionnaires. The Ambiguous Social Scenario Task was used to measure both threatening and hostile interpretations in response to written vignettes. Results Results showed that social anxiety was uniquely related to more threatening interpretations, while CU-traits were uniquely related to more hostile interpretations. These relationships were replicated for the community sample. For the clinical sample, only the link between social anxiety and threatening interpretations was significant. Explorative analyses showed that adolescents with externalizing disorders scored higher on hostile interpretations than adolescents with internalizing disorders. Conclusions Overall, these results support the content-specificity of threatening interpretation biases in social anxiety and of hostile interpretation biases in CU-traits. Better understanding the roles of interpretation biases in different psychopathologies might open avenues for tailored prevention and intervention paradigms.

Pathways to adolescent social anxiety: Testing interactions between neural social reward function and perceived social threat in daily life

“…The Peer Social Incentive Delay (P-SID) task (Hutchinson et al, 2021;Kaurin et al, 2022) is a peer-observation adaptation of the original Social Incentive Delay task (Cremers et al, 2015) designed to measure brain activity related to social rewards and punishments. This "peer observation" version of the task was created to examine neural activation to social feedback from a virtual peer.…”

“…Social anxiety has often been studied in relation to heightened threat reactivity, and young people with (and at risk for) social anxiety are more prone to perceiving threat in their social interactions (Dapprich et al, 2023;Kingsbury & Coplan, 2016). Emerging research also suggests that aberrant neural reward responsiveness may play a role in the development of social anxiety.…”

“…To measure neural reactivity to social reward cues, we administered a peer-observation version of the Social Incentive Delay task (Cremers et al, 2015) in the MRI scanner at baseline (Wave 1). During the anticipation phase of this Peer-Social Incentive Delay (P-SID) task, participants view different shapes (cues) that alert them to the types of performance-related feedback they can receive from "peers" they believe to be observing them complete a task; this P-SID task is highly developmentally relevant given the salience of peer evaluative feedback in adolescence.…”