Out of the shadows and into the spotlight: Social blunders fuel fear of self-exposure in social anxiety disorder

Not intended, still embarrassed: Social anxiety is related to increased levels of embarrassment in response to unintentional social norm violations

“…The results reported here extend those of Blair and colleagues [23], by showing that the aberrant behavioral response to unintentional SN violations observed in SAD-patients is also present in participants from the general population with high SA-levels. Furthermore, our finding of increased embarrassment for unintentional SN violations is in line with previous work, which indicated that both SAD-patients as well as participants with high SA-levels overestimate the negative consequences of unintentional social blunders [14, 44]. In addition, our results link to the idea that both negative interpretation biases as well as disordered self-referential processing, at the cognitive and neural level, are important characteristics of SA [17, 45–55].…”

“…Previous studies have indicated that SAD-patients experience disturbances in self-referential processing and have biases concerning the opinion of others about them: they have increased self-portrayal concerns [9], for example when it concerns their social rank [10, 11] or their own social performance [12, 13], they overestimate the negative consequences of their own social blunders [14] and are characterized by negatively biased learning about themselves from social feedback [15]. Furthermore, clinical SAD is associated with an increased belief in negative interpretations of social situations [16] and SAD-patients focus predominantly on potentially embarrassing events when they evaluate themselves in a social context [17].…”

Effects of mask-wearing on social anxiety: an exploratory review

“…For example, a study of 908 participants from eight countries who evaluated behaviors described in vignettes of social situations found that SA was significantly correlated with decreased acceptance of attention-seeking behaviors (Heinrichs et al, 2006), both for participants' own conduct and for their perceived cultural acceptability in general. In another study, Moscovitch et al (2015) presented three groups of participantsindividuals with SAD, individuals with an anxiety disorder other than SAD, and individuals without any psychiatric diagnosiswith vignettes describing unintentional yet realistic and commonplace social blunders (e.g., tripping in front of a romantic interest). They found that participants with SAD rated social blunders to be both more costly and more shame-inducing than either control group, but only when participants imagined committing the blunders themselves.…”

“…Research points to the importance of self-focused attention in the transgressor (see Spurr & Stopa, 2002). For example, in the study by Moscovitch et al (2015;described above), although participants with a diagnosis of SAD were more embarrassed by imagined social blunders compared to participants with another type of anxiety disorder, this was only true when the blunders were committed by themselves versus others, implicating a focus on the self in the negative feelings associated with anti-normative behavior, and supporting the notion that people with SAD fear that social norm transgressions will expose perceived core flaws in the transgressor (Moscovitch et al, 2015). Using a similar paradigm, Fung et al (2016) reported that the perceived negative consequences of social blunders can be reduced when contextual information unrelated to the blunder is emphasized, suggesting that redirecting participants' attention from the self to external aspects of the situation may help to reduce sensitivities to the potential costs of social norm violations for people with higher SA.…”

Reconnecting in the Face of Exclusion: Individuals with High Social Anxiety May Feel the Push of Social Pain, but not the Pull of Social Rewards

“…Entering social interactions with such negative appraisals of the self in relation to others may lower their threshold for perceiving threat cues that signify the possibility of social rejection (Bantin et al, 2016 ; Harb et al, 2002 ). Thus, oversensitivity to threat (e.g., excessive attention and responsivity to threat signals) may be one important factor that motivates people with high SA to prevent further damage and “cut their losses” by socially withdrawing in response to social exclusion, rather than heightening their affiliative efforts (see also Bielak & Moscovitch, 2013 ; Moscovitch et al, 2012 , 2015 ; Steinman et al, 2014 ).…”