New Insights Into Feeling Socially Anxious

This blog post was written by Christian A. L. Bean, M.A., and edited by Jonas Everaert, Ph.D.

Do you ever find yourself replaying an awkward or uncomfortable social interaction in your mind hours, days, or even weeks after it occurred? Perhaps you are hoping to understand what the other person meant by their words or actions or what the implications might be for your relationship going forward.

Suppose, for instance, that a relatively new friend makes a joke at your expense. Is this a mean-spirited, sarcastic sign that they don’t like you, or could their teasing comment be a playful signal that they are becoming more comfortable with you? Does your interpretation change if you later get a text from this friend that they are looking forward to getting lunch with you next week? What if, instead, their text informed you that they wanted to cancel that lunch? Our social lives are full of ambiguity that often requires us to make initial interpretations and update our conclusions as we learn new information that helps to shed light on the situation.

How we resolve such social ambiguity may affect how likely we are to experience social anxiety, which is becoming increasingly common. Current estimates of the worldwide prevalence of social anxiety suggest that 36 percent of young adults globally and 57 percent of young adults in the U.S. are living with clinically significant levels of social anxiety (Jeffries & Ungar, 2020). These rates clearly show that we need to understand how people respond to social ambiguity and how this may contribute to the experience of social anxiety.

Social ambiguity and anxiety

We recently conducted a longitudinal study (Bean et al., in press) on the role of the interpretation of social ambiguity in social anxiety. Roughly 100 college students completed a task in the lab that presented them with several social scenarios featuring other people saying things or acting in ambiguous ways. The students were asked to interpret the meaning of the situation as if it were happening to them and then asked to reassess these interpretations as additional information was given that made it more obvious that the situation most likely holds positive or negative social implications. This allowed us to measure how often they tended to choose positive interpretations (“The other person likes me”), how often they tended to choose negative interpretations (“The other person doesn’t like me”), and how often they switched interpretations when new information was given to them about the scenario (“Actually, I think they might like me after all”).

To study changes in social anxiety levels over time, these students also completed a measure of social anxiety symptoms and completed the same measure at 2-week and 4-week follow-ups.

We found that the study participants who more often chose positive interpretations were more likely to show decreases in social anxiety at both follow-ups. Interestingly, tendencies to interpret social ambiguity positively were found to predict decreases in social anxiety over time, even in cases where a negative interpretation would have been more accurate. How often the students chose negative interpretations or the degree to which they correctly adjusted their interpretations in response to clarifying information were both unrelated to changes in social anxiety over time. Continuing our earlier example, a student who interpreted their new friend’s joke as a sign of affection and a deepening sense of familiarity would be expected to show decreases in social anxiety over time, even if that was not how the other person intended the joke to be received.

These results suggest that tendencies to interpret ambiguous social interpretations positively may play an important role in buffering against social anxiety, and not doing so on a regular basis may increase the risk of developing social anxiety.

But what about folks who already experience social anxiety?

Well, adults and children with social anxiety tend to underestimate how likable they are, a bias that has been shown in socially anxious children as young as 7 years old (Baartmans et al., 2020). Keeping this bias toward self-deprecation in mind, the next time you or a loved one find yourself trying to make sense of a recent ambiguous social interaction, you might consider treating a positive interpretation as the default or most likely to be accurate. By choosing optimism, you may be able to correct for the negative bias associated with social anxiety and come to a more realistic appraisal of the meaning and implications of the event.