Adolescent Safety Behaviors and Social Anxiety: Links to Psychosocial Impairments and Functioning with Unfamiliar Peer Confederates

Abstract

Socially anxious adolescents often endure anxiety-provoking situations using safety behaviors: strategies for minimizing in-the-moment distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact, rehearsing statements before entering a conversation). Studies linking safety behaviors to impaired functioning have largely focused on adults. In a sample of one hundred thirty-four 14 to 15 year-old adolescents, we tested whether levels of safety behaviors among socially anxious adolescents relate to multiple domains of impaired functioning. Adolescents, parents, and research personnel completed survey measures of safety behaviors and social anxiety, adolescents and parents reported about adolescents’ evaluative fears and psychosocial impairments, and adolescents participated in a set of tasks designed to simulate social interactions with same-age, unfamiliar peers. Relative to other adolescents in the sample, adolescents high on both safety behaviors and social anxiety displayed greater psychosocial impairments, evaluative fears, and observed social skills deficits within social interactions. These findings have important implications for assessing and treating adolescent social anxiety.

The Work and Social Adjustment Scale for Youth: Psychometric properties of the teacher version and evidence of contextual variability in psychosocial impairments.

“…In prior work Okuno et al, 2021), the WSASY displayed high internal consistency (i.e., α's ≥ .80), particularly for a five-item scale (see Youngstrom et al, 2019). In fact, scores from the WSASY parent and youth versions (a) relate to scores from a broad array of well-established survey measures of parent, youth, and family functioning; (b) distinguish adolescents on the number of co-occurring mental health concerns and peer-related impairments; and (c) predict independent observers' ratings of youths' interpersonal functioning in social interactions.…”

Integrating multi-informant reports of youth mental health: A construct validation test of Kraemer and colleagues’ (2003) Satellite Model

“…By combining these two groups, we capitalized on key features of adolescent mental health concerns, namely that they dimensionally vary in the general population (i.e., fewer numbers of adolescents displaying concerns relative to those not displaying concerns, and scores ranging from relatively low concerns to relatively high concerns). This is an approach we have taken in multiple studies leveraging this same sample (e.g., Botkin et al, 2021;Okuno et al, 2021;Greenberg and De Los Reyes, 2022), including the study our current study seeks to extend (Makol et al, 2020).…”

“…By combining these two groups, we capitalized on key features of adolescent mental health concerns, namely that they dimensionally vary in the general population (i.e., fewer numbers of adolescents displaying concerns relative to those not displaying concerns, and scores ranging from relatively low concerns to relatively high concerns). This is an approach we have taken in multiple studies leveraging this same sample (e.g., Botkin et al, 2021 ; Okuno et al, 2021 ; Greenberg and De Los Reyes, 2022 ), including the study our current study seeks to extend ( Makol et al, 2020 ). Further, this approach is consistent with both current initiatives focused on dimensional models of psychopathology (e.g., Insel et al, 2010 ), and prior work indicating enhanced reliability and validity for dimensional approaches to measuring and examining psychopathology, relative to discrete approaches (e.g., testing aims separately within subgroups; Markon et al, 2011 ).…”

Understanding School Anxiety in Italian Adolescence through an Artificial Neural Network: Influence of Social Skills and Coping Strategies

“…Social skills in schoolchildren refer to a set of learned behaviors that enable students to interact effectively and appropriately with peers and adults [24,25]. They are a set of behavioral and emotional competencies that enable students to interact effectively and appropriately with peers and adults [26]. These competencies include the ability to communicate clearly, listen attentively, cooperate with others, express thoughts and feelings assertively, and handle conflict situations in a respectful way [27][28][29][30].…”