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Disrupted joint action accounts for reduced likability of socially anxious individuals.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:Motivated by their fear of disapproval, individuals with social anxiety continually monitor their own behaviour during social interactions hoping to prevent dreaded negative outcomes. Ironically, they do evoke less positive reactions from others. This study investigated whether lower engagement in the interpersonal process of joint action by socially anxious individuals leads them to attract less positive ratings by their conversation partners. METHOD:High socially anxious (HSA; N?=?36) and low socially anxious individuals (LSA; N?=?36) had separate conversations with a naïve conversation partner (N?=?36). Conversations were filmed and analysed for joint action using the conventional manual way and a more exploratory automated way. Conversation partners rated the quality of the interaction and the person they talked to. RESULTS:Conversation partners rated HSA participants less positively than LSA participants. The conventional manual method showed less joint action in conversations with LSA participants and crucially, joint action served as mediator between social anxiety status and general impression, quality of interaction and desire to meet again. These results were not replicated with the automated method. LIMITATIONS:The study used an analogue sample and future research should investigate whether these findings also apply to a clinical sample. Future studies should further explore the utility of automated techniques to measure joint action. CONCLUSION:Reduced joint action may explain why socially anxious individuals tend to be perceived less positively by others. The findings emphasise the importance of taking an interpersonal and holistic approach to understanding aspects of social anxiety disorder.

SUBMITTER: Gunak MM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7232015 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Disrupted joint action accounts for reduced likability of socially anxious individuals.

Günak Mia Maria MM Clark David M DM Lommen Miriam J J MJJ

Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry 20190905

<h4>Background and objectives</h4>Motivated by their fear of disapproval, individuals with social anxiety continually monitor their own behaviour during social interactions hoping to prevent dreaded negative outcomes. Ironically, they do evoke less positive reactions from others. This study investigated whether lower engagement in the interpersonal process of joint action by socially anxious individuals leads them to attract less positive ratings by their conversation partners.<h4>Method</h4>Hig ...[more]

PMID: 31739248

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Project description:Positive self-beliefs are important for well-being, and are influenced by how others evaluate us during social interactions. Mechanistic accounts of self-beliefs have mostly relied on associative learning models. These account for choice behaviour but not for the explicit beliefs that trouble socially anxious patients. Neither do they speak to self-schemas, which underpin vulnerability according to psychological research. Here, we compared belief-based and associative computational models of social-evaluation, in individuals that varied in fear of negative evaluation (FNE), a core symptom of social anxiety. We used a novel analytic approach, 'clinically informed model-fitting', to determine the influence of FNE symptom scores on model parameters. We found that high-FNE participants learn more easily from negative feedback about themselves, manifesting in greater self-negative learning rates. Crucially, we provide evidence that this bias is underpinned by an overall reduced belief about self-positive attributes. The study population could be characterized equally well by belief-based or associative models, however large individual differences in model likelihood indicated that some individuals relied more on an associative (model-free), while others more on a belief-guided strategy. Our findings have therapeutic importance, as positive belief activation may be used to specifically modulate learning.Author summaryUnderstanding how we form and maintain positive self-beliefs is crucial to understanding how things go awry in disorders such as social anxiety. The loss of positive self-belief in social anxiety, especially in inter-personal contexts, is thought to be related to how we integrate evaluative information that we receive from others. We frame this social information integration as a learning problem and ask how people learn whether someone approves of them or not. We thus elucidate why the decrease in positive evaluations manifests only for the self, but not for an unknown other, given the same information. We investigated the mechanics of this learning using a novel computational modelling approach, comparing models that treat the learning process as series of stimulusresponse associations with models that treat learning as updating of beliefs about the self (or another). We show that both models characterise the process well and that individuals higher in symptoms of social anxiety learn more from negative information specifically about the self. Crucially, we provide evidence that this originates from a reduction in the amount of positive attributes that are activated when the individual is placed in a social evaluative context.

Project description:BackgroundSocial anxiety has been associated with potentiated negative affect and, more recently, with diminished positive affect. It is unclear how these alterations in negative and positive affect are represented neurally in socially anxious individuals and, further, whether they generalize to non-social stimuli. To explore this, we used a monetary incentive paradigm to explore the association between social anxiety and both the anticipation and consumption of non-social incentives. Eighty-four individuals from a longitudinal community sample underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participating in a monetary incentive delay (MID) task. The MID task consisted of alternating cues indicating the potential to win or prevent losing varying amounts of money based on the speed of the participant's response. We examined whether self-reported levels of social anxiety, averaged across approximately 7 years of data, moderated brain activity when contrasting gain or loss cues with neutral cues during the anticipation and outcome phases of incentive processing. Whole brain analyses and analyses restricted to the ventral striatum for the anticipation phase and the medial prefrontal cortex for the outcome phase were conducted.ResultsSocial anxiety did not associate with differences in hit rates or reaction times when responding to cues. Further, socially anxious individuals did not exhibit decreased ventral striatum activity during anticipation of gains or decreased MPFC activity during the outcome of gain trials, contrary to expectations based on literature indicating blunted positive affect in social anxiety. Instead, social anxiety showed positive associations with extensive regions implicated in default mode network activity (for example, precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, and parietal lobe) during anticipation and receipt of monetary gain. Social anxiety was further linked with decreased activity in the ventral striatum during anticipation of monetary loss.ConclusionsSocially anxious individuals may increase default mode network activity during reward processing, suggesting high self-focused attention even in relation to potentially rewarding stimuli lacking explicit social connotations. Additionally, social anxiety may relate to decreased ventral striatum reactivity when anticipating potential losses.

Project description:BackgroundMale volunteers entered an immersive virtual reality that depicted a party, where they were approached by a lone virtual woman who initiated a conversation. The goal was to study how socially anxious and socially confident men would react to this event. Interest focused on whether the socially anxious participants would exhibit sustained anxiety during the conversation or whether this would diminish over time, and differ from the responses of the more socially confident men.MethodologyThe scenario was a party with five virtual characters, four sitting at a distance from the participant and talking amongst themselves and one lone woman standing closer. The woman approached the participant, introduced herself and initiated a conversation that was first about mundane matters and then became more personal and intimate. Participants were men who were either relatively socially confident (18) or socially anxious in their relationships with women (18). A second experimental factor was whether or not the other four characters occasionally looked towards the participant. There was a post-trial questionnaire about social anxiety in relation to the experience, and skin conductance and ECG physiological measures were recorded. Our expectation was that the socially anxious participants would show greater anxiety throughout.ConclusionsCompared to baseline readings both socially confident and socially anxious groups on average showed signs of significantly increased stress at the initial approach of the virtual woman. The stress then diminished once the conversation entered into the mundane phase and then did not significantly change. Comparing pre- and post-questionnaire anxiety scores there was no change for the more confident participants but a significant decrease in average score amongst the anxious group. The methodology of placing socially anxious participants in a virtual reality where they can gain experience of how to act in a stressful situation promises a novel way forward for treating social anxiety.

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Disrupted joint action accounts for reduced likability of socially anxious individuals.

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Disrupted joint action accounts for reduced likability of socially anxious individuals.

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