Social anxiety and the acquisition of anxiety towards self-attributes

ABSTRACT

The current studies examined whether self-attributes can come to elicit anxiety after being paired with negative evaluation. Results from Study 1 suggested that appearing unintelligent and appearing nervous were partially distinct attributes of concern related to social anxiety and validated stimuli used in the subsequent study. In Study 2, participants completed a differential associative learning task in which either words related low intelligence or appearing nervous were paired with negative evaluation. Results suggested that participant anxiety and expectancy ratings increased for words belonging to the attribute category paired with negative evaluation but not the other. Participant social anxiety was not associated with the effects.

KEYWORDS:

• social anxiety
• associative learning
• self-attributes
• negative evaluation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Cris Bude, Ella Golz, Taylyn Jameson, Lara Winkless, and Rachel Hueller for help with data collection. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework as files “self-attributes study 1 data” and “self-attributes study 2 data” through this link (http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6DAAY), no reference number was issued. The pre-registration for study 2 can be accessed through this link (https://osf.io/4xyqt), E-PRIME script for study 2 (“self-attributes SGx2.es3”), and analysis code (“self-attributes study 1 and 2 analysis”) are deposited as files accessible through this link (http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6DAAY).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The words naïve and insecure were retained as stimuli although they did not follow a simple factor structure in Study 1. Studies 1 and 2 were carried out concurrently and the decision to retain the words as stimuli was based on preliminary results from Study 1.

2 Consistent with the findings, previous research showed pairing self-relevant stimuli with positive evaluation led to decreases in social anxiety-related indices (Clerkin & Teachman, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship awarded to the first author, and Social Sciences and Humantiies Research Council of Canda research grant 435-2018-0330 awarded to the second author.