Social anxiety is characterized by persistent and excessive fear of negative evaluation by others which can lead to avoidance and physiological arousal when in social situations. Pupil size is a...Show moreSocial anxiety is characterized by persistent and excessive fear of negative evaluation by others which can lead to avoidance and physiological arousal when in social situations. Pupil size is a reliable indicator of physiological arousal and can be measured using pupillometry. Cognitive models postulate that social anxiety is related to enhanced pupil dilation, whereas empirical studies show decreased pupil dilation. This contradiction could be explained by an avoidance of processing threatening stimuli in individuals with social anxiety. Moreover, a higher degree of intimacy may lead to a higher likelihood of avoidance, resulting in greater reduction in pupil size. This study investigated the effect of social anxiety on pupil size during a face-to-face conversation task and the effect of intimacy of topic (high vs low) on this relationship. The present study had an experimental, correlational design and included 66 female participants aged between 18 and 30. Social anxiety was measured by the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale questionnaire and pupil size was recorded by wearable eye-trackers. Participants had a conversation task with a confederate consisting of 18 questions. These questions were divided in three blocks of 6, wherein block 1 and 3 were low in intimacy and block 2 was high in intimacy. For the analyses the pupil size of the left, right and average of both eyes was used. For the left-eye, right-eye and average of both eyes’ pupil size, the ANCOVA revealed no main effect of social anxiety, intimacy of topic and no interaction effect between social anxiety and intimacy of topic. In the preliminary analysis, a main effect of time was found. The current study was one of the first studies that used a face-to-face conversation task with varying levels of intimacy to investigate the relationship between social anxiety and pupil size. No significant effects were found between level of social anxiety and pupil size, as well as for the effect of intimacy of topic. However, there was a significant effect found for time, with pupil size decreasing over time in all participants. More research is needed to investigate these relationships.Show less
Socially anxious individuals often worry about social outcomes. Social situations are experienced as threatening and are endured with a lot of stress and anxiety. The human's physiological and...Show moreSocially anxious individuals often worry about social outcomes. Social situations are experienced as threatening and are endured with a lot of stress and anxiety. The human's physiological and behavioral response to threat is coordinated by the stress response system. Previous research provided support that spontaneous body sway and autonomic responses to, purely social threat cues, involve a complex freeze-like pattern of behavior. Socially anxious individuals can also show different facial expressions. Research provided evidence for more blank facial expressions by people who score higher on social anxiety during a socially anxious situation. This study investigated the relation between social anxiety and upper body movement, smiling and frowning. It is hypothesized that individuals who show less upper body movement, less smiling and less frowning score higher on socially anxiety. Healthy participants (N = 68; 14 male and 54 female), aged 18 to 39 years old (M = 22.40; SD = 3.90), reporting normal vision, participated in an interaction with an avatar that showed interactive nonverbal behavior. Social anxiety was measured by the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. The frequency and duration of body movements, smiles and frowns were coded based on the videos of the participants. Data were analysed using regression analysis. Upper body movement, smiling and frowning were separately treated as independent variables and social anxiety as a dependent variable. The results show no relation with social anxiety. Neither did the results of a multiple regression analysis show that one type of behavior was more characteristic of individuals with social anxiety. This is in contrast with the literature. Limitations of the present study are discussed and suggestions for further research are offered. Identifying behaviors at an early stage could be helpful for early interventions or prevention of social anxiety.Show less
The cognitive models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) reason that SAD is caused and maintained by self-focused attention and safety behaviors. The avoidance of eye contact is viewed as a safety...Show moreThe cognitive models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) reason that SAD is caused and maintained by self-focused attention and safety behaviors. The avoidance of eye contact is viewed as a safety-seeking behavior employed to reduce the risk of negative evaluation and is reported by both adults and children with SAD. In the light of growing evidence for the cognitive models of SAD, it seems likely that changing socially anxious individuals’ negative beliefs about themselves, and their performance could lead to more eye gaze behavior, which in turn could break the vicious cycle maintaining SAD. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of a cognitive behavioral intervention on the the relation between socially anxious adolescents’ cognitions and their eye gaze behavior. Cognitions were assessed by a questionnaire and eye gaze behavior was assessed using a wearable eye tracker during a public speaking task. The participants’ total fixation time, total fixation counts and average fixation time on the faces of nine virtual audience members were measured. As expected, the results showed a significant increase in positive cognitions and a significant decrease in negative cognitions from pre-test to post-test. The group as a whole did not show a significant increase in eye gaze behavior, however participants who showed more substantial improvements in terms of positive self-statements on average fixated longer on the audience members’ faces. These findings offer support for the cognitive models of SAD and suggest that promoting more positive self-statements in socially anxious adolescents would be clinically beneficial.Show less
The COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions, like lockdowns, have resulted in changes in the lives of adolescents. Not much was known about the effect of lockdowns on social anxiety in...Show moreThe COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions, like lockdowns, have resulted in changes in the lives of adolescents. Not much was known about the effect of lockdowns on social anxiety in adolescents. Aim. This study aimed to gain insight into changes in social anxiety before and after a school closure associated with COVID-19 lockdown and its relation to the experience of the lockdown in Dutch adolescents aged 12-15 years. Methods. A total of 188 adolescents (M = 13.48, SD = 0.81) completed self-report measures of social anxiety on March 2020 (T1). In September 2020 (T2) they completed the same self-report measures of social anxiety, enjoyment of the lockdown, and Worries about COVID-19. Results. Adolescents with average or high symptoms of social anxiety before the first school closure showed a significant reduction in social anxiety symptoms after the first school closure. The expected positive association between social anxiety before and after school closure was moderated by Enjoying the lockdown but not gender. Furthermore, higher symptoms of social anxiety before the first school closure were associated with higher levels of enjoying the lockdown. Conclusion. Results indicated that adolescents with moderate to high social anxiety symptoms and who enjoyed the lockdown and associated consequences such as less face-to-face interaction were most at-risk of reporting higher symptoms of social anxiety once the schools had reopened.Show less
Mimicry is the replication of another person’s behaviour and/or physiological state in short temporal succession of the original behaviour. It can be differentiated into autonomic mimicry and motor...Show moreMimicry is the replication of another person’s behaviour and/or physiological state in short temporal succession of the original behaviour. It can be differentiated into autonomic mimicry and motor mimicry, with the former denoting mimicry of autonomic nervous system activity such as heart rate, with visible behaviours such as blushing or pupil dilation, whereas motor mimicry is any mimicry of motor movements. Together, these two types of autonomic mimicry result in emotional mimicry, also called emotional contagion. The primary aspect of emotional mimicry is reciprocal evaluation, as people with positive affiliation towards each other exhibit it the most. However, socially anxious people have deficiencies in motor mimicry and do not prefer a mimicking partner. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether highly socially anxious people would evaluate virtual characters exhibiting autonomic mimicry less positively than low socially anxious individuals. Within the study, 29 people with different levels of social anxiety were exposed to autonomic mimicry through pupil dilation by three virtual characters telling three different stories, whilst three others told stories without mimicking the participants, but still exhibiting occasional pupil dilation. Comfortability around the characters was measured through the desire for future interaction scale, and liking through an avatar evaluation questionnaire. Two repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) and two mixed ANOVA were conducted and yielded no significant differences in evaluation between the mimicry conditions, nor any significant mediation of these differences by the social anxiety group, suggesting that differences in peoples’ evaluations of mimicry are primarily reserved to motor mimicry.Show less
Background: Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is highly prevalent around the world, and often develops in childhood. Transfer of SAD from parents-to-children occurs both by genetic transmission as by...Show moreBackground: Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is highly prevalent around the world, and often develops in childhood. Transfer of SAD from parents-to-children occurs both by genetic transmission as by environmental transmission, namely by social learning. The verbal information pathway is known as one of the social learning pathways for fear. There are multiple studies on the acquisition of animal fears via the verbal pathway, but studies on social fears are limited. Therefore this study aims to investigate the verbal information pathway as a learning mechanism of social fears. Besides, a proposed risk factor for the development of SAD, behavioral inhibition (BI), is included in the current study as a potential moderator. Methods: The study sample consisted of 68 dyads, with children aged 4-6. Parents provided safety and threat information about two strangers to the children. Fear beliefs were compared between safety and threat condition. In addition, a questionnaire measured children’s BI tendency to study both as a covariate and directly in relation with fear beliefs. Results: When children received threat information fear beliefs were significantly higher compared to when children received safety information about the stranger. There was no interaction effect or main effect with BI. Conclusions: We conclude that 4-to-6-year old children are influenced by parents verbal information about strangers in such a way that threat information compared to safety information creates more fear beliefs. Besides, moderation by BI was not significant in the community sample used in the current study.Show less
