The structure of the construct system: In social anxiety: Qulifications due to affective confounding

Abstract

Studies of socially anxious persons' construct system have been scarce and have not considered problems of secondary affective confounds. Given the high correlations between social anxiety and depression, it is likely that these studies included persons with not only high levels of social anxiety, but also high levels of depression. Therefore, it is difficult to know it their results were due to social anxiety, to depression, or to an interaction of the two. In the present study, we compared subjects high in only social anxiety with subjects either high in both social anxiety and depression (mixed group) or low in both affects (control group) on three structural measures of their interpersonal construt systems obtained by using kelly's Role Construct Repertory Grid. Compared with contol subjects, socially anxious subjects showed less construct differentiation in their construct system but more construct integration. This suggests that people with social anxiety may lack the range of independent interpersonal constructs necessary for accurately understanding and predicting other's behavior in social situations, although they seem to apply their few interpersonal with a wide range of discriminations, perhaps because of their exclusive reliance on these constructs to construe any given social situation. Nevertheless, only the differences between the mixed and control groups were significant, indicating that those abnormal cognitive characteristics depend more on the interaction of depression and social anxiety than on social anxiety per se.