The mediating role of state maladaptive emotion regulation in the relation between social anxiety symptoms and self-evaluation bias

ABSTRACT

Although social anxiety symptoms are robustly linked to biased self-evaluations across time, the mechanisms of this relation remain unclear. The present study tested three maladaptive emotion regulation strategies – state post-event processing, state experiential avoidance, and state expressive suppression – as potential mediators of this relation. Undergraduate participants (N = 88; 61.4% Female) rated their social skill in an impromptu conversation task and then returned to the laboratory approximately two days later to evaluate their social skill in the conversation again. Consistent with expectations, state post-event processing and state experiential avoidance mediated the relation between social anxiety symptoms and worsening self-evaluations of social skill (controlling for research assistant evaluations), particularly for positive qualities (e.g. appeared confident, demonstrated social skill). State expressive suppression did not mediate the relation between social anxiety symptoms and changes in self-evaluation bias across time. These findings highlight the role that spontaneous, state experiential avoidance and state post-event processing may play in the relation between social anxiety symptoms and worsening self-evaluation biases of social skill across time.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• social anxiety
• self-evaluation
• post-event processing
• experiential avoidance
• expressive suppression

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the wonderful ACE Lab research assistants who helped with this project: Kaitlyn Smith, Kelli Peterman, and Megan Deis. We would also like to thank Dr. Aaron Luebbe for his invaluable statistical guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.