The Psychology of Social Anxiety

There’s not always a lot of socializing going on in social anxiety, but there’s certainly a lot of thinking. People with social anxiety appear to have developed some very biased ways of thinking that maintain the anxiety over time.

Let’s begin with a simple demonstration. U.K. clinical psychologist Warren Mansell and colleagues conducted a very simple experiment with participants who were either high or low on measures of social anxiety. Each participant was asked to make a three-minute speech on a controversial topic to a TV monitor that they believed displayed six people who were watching their performance live. Two audience members exhibited only positive behaviours during the speech (nodding, leaning forward, smiling), two audience members exhibited only negative behaviours (yawning, looking around, shaking head), and the remaining two exhibited only neutral behaviours (adjusting seat position, playing with a pen).

After the speeches, the high social anxiety participants reported that overall the audience had judged their performance significantly more negatively than the low socially anxious participants. More specifically, high socially anxious participants were selectively attending to audience members who were negatively evaluating them. The researchers concluded that socially anxious individuals may base their judgments of being disapproved by others on limited processing of their social environment[1]—namely a biased processing that overfocuses on potentially negative information about their performance.

The heads of the socially anxious seem to be full of negative biases of this kind. This leads to excessively negative predictions about future social events, and this biased evaluation helps to support social avoidance behaviours. They are more likely to interpret ambiguous social information negatively and interpret their own performances in social situations significantly more critically than non-sufferers and independent assessors who have objectively observed and rated their performance[2]. They themselves are their most hardened and destructive critics.

In addition, the socially anxious have a genuine block when it comes to receiving and processing positive social feedback, and have an inability to take anything "good" from a social performance[3]. These information-processing biases make it almost inevitable that the socially anxious are going to negatively evaluate themselves and their performance in social situations and severely underestimate their own social skills—self-judgments that are all grist to the mill of beating yourself up and avoiding the next social interaction.

So what facilitates this almost single-minded focus on negativity and poor self-evaluation? Well, socially anxious individuals tend to shift their focus of attention inwards onto themselves and their own anxiety when in social situations. I can remember many examples of this from my own youth. On one school speech day, I had to walk from the audience on to the stage to receive my prize. As far as I was concerned, I felt like a condemned man walking towards the hangman’s gibbet. The stage was an unfocused blur and all I could feel was a pair of wobbly legs taking me step by every tortuous step up the aisle nearer to what I felt was about to be a social catastrophe in a swelteringly hot assembly hall.

As it happened, it wasn’t a social catastrophe. I picked up my prize and shook hands with the distinguished somebody who was there to make the day important. But afterwards, I vowed never to do that again because everyone must have seen me wobbling tentatively towards the stage on shaking legs and with a brow soaked in anxious sweat. But everyone I spoke to afterward said they didn’t see anything unusual. I wasn’t a quivering jelly, I wasn’t covered in sweat, and I didn’t look anxious … but I didn’t believe them. From my perspective, I was a walking embarrassment.

This shift of attention inwards in socially anxious individuals is known as self-focused attention and leads those who are socially anxious to believe they may look as anxious as they feel inside[4]. It’s interesting that those with social anxiety often recall social memories from an observer perspective rather than a personal perspective.

In one study, socially anxious individuals were asked to recall a recent specific occasion when they felt anxious and uncomfortable in a social situation. They were allowed 30 seconds to image the scene and then given the following instruction: “Thinking about the image you’ve just had, is your predominant impression one of viewing the situation as if looking through your eyes, observing the details of what is going on around you or is the predominant impression one in which you are observing yourself as if you were outside yourself looking at yourself from an external point of view?”

In memories of social situations, the socially anxious reported a marked observer perspective whereas non-socially anxious individuals took a field perspective (seeing the situation as if looking through their own eyes)[5]. Interestingly, my own memory of that school speech day is very much from an observer perspective—I’m hovering above the assembled throng watching myself walk unsteadily and anxiously up the aisle towards the stage. This rather odd perspective-taking is almost certainly a post-event mental construction (no one has yet convinced me that I can actually hover above crowds taking images of the scene below like a camera drone). If you’re fully focused only on your internal reactions, you’ll have no sensory memory of the external features of the social event for your own physical perspective—only memories of your own feelings. It’s presumably from these anxious feelings that I constructed my observer-based perspective of an anxious perspiring figure hopelessly staggering through the lines of assembled parents attempting to reach the stage without any embarrassing mishap. A perspective seemingly not shared by anyone else in the audience.

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Self-focused attention in social situations is itself a cause of anxiety, facilitates negative thoughts during the social interaction, and generates an expectation that others will rate you more negatively—and this occurs in both adults and children[6]. So switching to a self-focused mode is only likely to increase the severity of any anxiety feelings you have at the time.

Finally, even when the social interaction is over, the socially anxious individual can’t leave it alone. If it’s not bad enough predicting bad things happening prior to a social interaction and then focusing on anxious feelings during the event, the socially anxious person will then ruminate on their performance excessively after the event. After each significant social interaction, socially anxious individuals become their very own highly critical appraisal manager. They indulge in excessive post-event processing of social events that includes critical self-appraisal and an assessment of the severity of their anxiety symptoms—a process that has the effect of maintaining negative appraisals of performance over time and maintaining social anxiety[7].

This concatenation of cognitive and information processing biases has a monumental effect on anyone who is socially anxious. It maintains the predominant focus on feelings of anxiety during social events, generates highly critical self-evaluations of performance, prevents the processing of positive feedback, and spawns hours of ruminative negative thought about previous social interactions—all of which feed the anxiety beast itself, maintaining social anxiety and supporting active avoidance of social situations. But because we’ve been able to identify each of these different elements contributing to social anxiety, the shining ray of positive light here is that we can develop effective cognitive-based interventions to help manage each of them and significantly reduce the symptoms of social anxiety, and many of these techniques are already being deployed by therapists and organizations offering CBT services[8].