Socioeconomic status and social anxiety: attentional control as a key missing variable?

ABSTRACT

Background and Objectives:

The aim was to examine the role of attentional control as a psychological factor involved in socioeconomic status-related mental health differences, and specifically in social anxiety. Based on the literature on socioeconomic status differences in cognitive abilities and attentional control theory, we hypothesized that attentional control would account for the relation between socioeconomic status and social anxiety. We tested this hypothesis in an integrative model also including trait anxiety and subjective socioeconomic status.

Design:

Cross-sectional.

Method:

Online, 439 French adults were recruited via social media. They completed self-reported measures of attentional control, objective socioeconomic status, subjective socioeconomic status, social anxiety, and trait anxiety.

Results:

Using Structural Equation Modelling, findings showed a positive association between objective (but not subjective) socioeconomic status and attentional control, which in turn was related to social anxiety. Exploratory analyses showed that only income, as objective socioeconomic status indicator, was associated with attentional control.

Conclusions:

The current study is the first to support that low socioeconomic status individuals report less attentional control and more social anxiety symptoms. This suggests that attentional control is a psychological factor involved in social anxiety inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional control
• social anxiety
• trait anxiety
• socioeconomic status
• subjective socioeconomic status

Acknowledgements

The administration of the Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc had no role in data collection, data analysis, manuscript writing, or in deciding to submit the article for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Shi and colleagues (2019) have shown in their meta-analysis that self-report of attentional control was negatively associated with anxiety (both trait and state anxiety) and that this self-report was more strongly associated with anxiety than behavioral measures (with behavioral measures of attentional control displaying some suboptimal reliability, (McNally, 2019).

2 Income represents access to resources; education represents level of valorized cultural knowledge and access to an influent social network; occupation represents social prestige and is informative about the set of formative contexts and psychological experiences (e.g., prestigious occupations are associated with more task variety and freedom of choices; less prestigious occupations are associated with more supervision, routine, and limited freedom of choices and control).

3 Results were similar with and without students.

4 Because we were interested in comparing models with subjective socioeconomic status and personal relative deprivation, we also used the French version of the Personal Relative Deprivation Scale (Callan et al., 2008; α  = .73, M = 13.66, SD = 4.74). Results of these models are not developed further here but they are available upon reasonable request.

5 We preregistered that we were going to add the covariance based on modification indices. There is also a theoretical explanation for this specific covariance. Indeed, we conceptualized occupation as representing the prestige aspect of SES, and not as an additional operationalization of the economic dimension of SES. Following this, education and occupation in this model may both represent the cultural dimension of SES and income represents the economic dimension.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc local research grant [STATEMO].