Self-Evaluative Biases in Social Anxiety (original) (raw)
Related papers
Social Anxiety and Its Effects on Performance and Perception
Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 1998
This study examined whether the socially anxious show deficits in performance on a social task as well as how their anxiety and competence relate to judgments they make about themselves and others. Ratings from a panel of judges were used to compare men of high and low social anxiety on their performances in a simulated job interview. Participants also viewed videotapes of themselves and others and rated responses for content, fluency, nonverbal, and global competence. Contradicting predictions of a performance deficit model, high levels of social anxiety had no detrimental effect on participants' performance or on their ability to judge their own performance. In contrast, observer-rated competence was related to a number of significant effects for social judgment tasks. Implications for treatment of social anxiety and research on social anxiety are discussed.
Investigating a critical evaluation tendency in social anxiety
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2008
Models of social phobia suggest that socially anxious individuals have critical evaluation expectancies, expecting others to be inherently critical in their appraisal of performance. One potential source for these expectancies is generalization or projection of an individual's own critical evaluation tendencies. We recruited 89 students, informing them that they would be asked to deliver an impromptu speech. Participants were shown three short pre-recorded speeches and asked to rate the performance of the speaker in each. Participants were also asked to rate how well they thought they would perform. While social anxiety symptoms were correlated with predictions of poorer self-performance, the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and a tendency to more critically appraise the performance of others was only observed for speakers who displayed low levels of anxiety symptoms.
Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization model
Psychological Bulletin, 1982
This article presents a self-presentation approach to the study of social anxiety that proposes that social anxiety arises when people are motivated to make a preferred impression on real or imagined audiences but doubt they will do so, and thus perceive or imagine unsatisfactory evaluative reactions from subjectively important audiences. We presume that specific situational and dispositional antecedents of social anxiety operate by influencing people's motivation to impress others and their expectations of satisfactorily doing so. In contrast to drive models of anxiety but consistent with social learning theory, it is argued that the cognitive state of the individual mediates both affective arousal and behavior. The traditional inverted-U relation between anxiety and performance is reexamined in this light. Implications of the approach for counseling situations are considered, especially the recommendation that treatments be tailored to the specific type of selfpresentational problem encountered by clients,
2016
Models of social phobia suggest that socially anxious individuals have critical evaluation expectancies, expecting others to be inherently critical in their appraisal of performance. One potential source for these expectancies is generalization or projection of an individual’s own critical evaluation tendencies. We recruited 89 students, informing them that they would be asked to deliver an impromptu speech. Participants were shown three short pre-recorded speeches and asked to rate the performance of the speaker in each. Participants were also asked to rate how well they thought they would perform. While social anxiety symptoms were correlated with predictions of poorer self-performance, the relationship between social anxiety symptoms and a tendency to more critically appraise the performance of others was only observed for speakers who displayed low levels of anxiety symptoms.
Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 2013
Background: Clark and Wells’ cognitive model of social anxiety proposes that socially anxious individuals have negative expectations of performance prior to a social event, focus their attention predominantly on themselves and on their negative self-evaluations during an event, and use this negative self-processing to infer that other people are judging them harshly. Aims: The present study tested these propositions. Method: The study used a community sample of 161 adolescents aged 14–18 years. The participants gave a speech in front of a pre-recorded audience acting neutrally, and participants were aware that the projected audience was pre-recorded. Results: As expected, participants with higher levels of social anxiety had more negative performance expectations, higher self-focused attention, and more negative perceptions of the audience. Negative performance expectations and self-focused attention were found to mediate the relationship between social anxiety and audience percepti...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
Biased self-perception," the tendency to perceive one's social performance as more negative than observers do, is characteristic of socially anxious individuals. Selfattention processes are hypothesised to underlie biased self-perception, however, different models emphasise different aspects of self-attention, with attention to the public aspects of the self being prominent. The current study aimed to investigate the relative contribution of two types of dispositional self-attention; public-and private self-consciousness to biased self-perception in a high (n = 48) versus a low (n = 48) social anxiety group undergoing an interaction task. The main finding was that private self-consciousness explained substantial and unique variance in biased negative selfperception in individuals with high social anxiety, while public self-consciousness did not. This relationship was independent of increments in state anxiety. Private self-consciousness appeared to have a specific association with bias related to overestimation of negative social performance rather than underestimation of positive social performance. The implication of this finding is that current treatment models of Social anxiety disorder might include broader aspects of self-focused attention, especially in the context of formulating self-evaluation biases.
Responses of the Socially Anxious to the Prospect of Interpersonal Evaluation
Journal of Personality, 1990
We predicted that socially anxious people who are faced with the prospect of an interpersonal evaluation will act in an inhibited and withdrawn way Subjects who scored low or high on a measure of social anxiety told four stones about themselves to an interviewer In the anticipated-evaluation condition, the subjects learned that after they had told their stones, the interviewer would tell them her impressions of them In the control condition, no mention was made of an evaluation Judges rated transcnpts of the stones As predicted, socially anxious subjects who thought they were goii^ to be evaluated (relative to anxious subjects in the control condition and nonanxious subjects in both conditions) told shorter stones, and the events in their stones were commonplace rather than unique Their stones were also less revealing about ttiem as individuals, and less vivid Contrary to a second prediction, socially anxious subjects who expected to be evaluated did not act any less inhibited or withdrawn when their mterviewers were descnbed as very trusting than when they were descnbed as very wary Implications are discussed People who are socially anxious care very much about the kinds of impressions they convey to others but feel insecure about their ability to project the image they would like (Leary, 1983b, Schlenker & Leary,
Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 2008
Cognitive models emphasize that patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) are mainly characterized by biased perception of their social performance. In addition, there is a growing body of evidence showing that SAD patients suffer from actual deficits in social interaction. To unravel what characterizes SAD patients the most, underestimation of social performance (defined as the discrepancy between self-perceived and observer-perceived social performance), or actual (observer-perceived) social performance, 48 patients with SAD and 27 normal control participants were observed during a speech and conversation. Consistent with the cognitive model of SAD, patients with SAD underestimated their social performance relative to control participants during the two interactions, but primarily during the speech. Actual social performance deficits were clearly apparent in the conversation but not in the speech. In conclusion, interactions that pull for more interpersonal skills, like a conversation, elicit more actual social performance deficits whereas, situations with a performance character, like a speech, bring about more cognitive distortions in patients with SAD. #