Insights from the German Version of the Social Touch Questionnaire: How Attitude towards Social Touch relates to Symptoms of Social Anxiety

Author(s):  
Hanna Sophie Lapp ◽  
Ilona Croy
Author(s):  
Julia Reichenberger ◽  
Anne Kathrin Radix ◽  
Jens Blechert ◽  
Tanja Legenbauer

Abstract Purpose Eating disorders (ED) and social anxiety disorder are highly comorbid with potentially shared symptoms like social appearance anxiety (SAA) referring to a fear of being negatively evaluated by others’ because of overall appearance. SAA constitutes a risk factor for eating psychopathology and bridges between EDs and social anxiety disorder. Methods The present studies examined internal consistency, factor structure, test–retest reliability, gender and age invariance, convergent validity and differences between individuals with and without an ED of a German version of the social appearance anxiety scale (SAAS) in four independent samples (n1 = 473; n2 = 712; n3 = 79; n4 = 33) including adolescents and patients with EDs. Results Consistently, the SAAS showed excellent internal consistency (ωs ≥ 0.947) and a one-factorial structure. Convergent validity was shown via high correlations of the SAAS with social anxiety (e.g., social interaction anxiety r = 0.642; fear of negative evaluation rs ≥ 0.694), body image disturbance measures (e.g., shape concerns rs ≥ 0.654; weight concerns rs ≥ 0.607; body avoidance rs ≥ 0.612; body checking rs ≥ 0.651) and self-esteem (r = −0.557) as well as moderate correlations with general eating psychopathology (e.g., restrained rs ≥ 0.372; emotional r = 0.439; external eating r = 0.149). Additionally, the SAAS showed gender and age invariance and test–retest reliability after 4 weeks with r = 0.905 in Study 2 and was able to discriminate between individuals with and without an ED in Study 4. Conclusion Hence, the German version of the SAAS can reliably and validly assess SAA in female and male adolescents or adults with or without an ED. Additionally, the SAAS might be used in a therapeutic context to especially target patient groups suffering from EDs with comorbid social anxiety. Level of evidence Level III: Evidence obtained from cohort or case-control analytic studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 3349-3363
Author(s):  
Naomi H. Rodgers ◽  
Jennifer Y. F. Lau ◽  
Patricia M. Zebrowski

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine group and individual differences in attentional bias toward and away from socially threatening facial stimuli among adolescents who stutter and age- and sex-matched typically fluent controls. Method Participants included 86 adolescents (43 stuttering, 43 controls) ranging in age from 13 to 19 years. They completed a computerized dot-probe task, which was modified to allow for separate measurement of attentional engagement with and attentional disengagement from facial stimuli (angry, fearful, neutral expressions). Their response time on this task was the dependent variable. Participants also completed the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SAS-A) and provided a speech sample for analysis of stuttering-like behaviors. Results The adolescents who stutter were more likely to engage quickly with threatening faces than to maintain attention on neutral faces, and they were also more likely to disengage quickly from threatening faces than to maintain attention on those faces. The typically fluent controls did not show any attentional preference for the threatening faces over the neutral faces in either the engagement or disengagement conditions. The two groups demonstrated equivalent levels of social anxiety that were both, on average, very close to the clinical cutoff score for high social anxiety, although degree of social anxiety did not influence performance in either condition. Stuttering severity did not influence performance among the adolescents who stutter. Conclusion This study provides preliminary evidence for a vigilance–avoidance pattern of attentional allocation to threatening social stimuli among adolescents who stutter.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-58
Author(s):  
Umberto Granziol ◽  
◽  
Gioia Bottesi ◽  
Francesca Serra ◽  
Andrea Spoto ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orestis Zavlis ◽  
Myles Jones

Substantial overlap exists between schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders, with part of that overlap hypothesised to be due to comorbid social anxiety. The current paper investigates the interactions and factor structure of these disorders at a personality trait level, through the lens of a network model. The items of the Autism Quotient (AQ), Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire Brief-Revised (SPQ-BR), and the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (L-SAS) were combined and completed by 345 members of the general adult population. An Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) on the AQ-SPQ-BR combined inventory revealed two communities (factors), which reflected the general autism and schizotypal phenotypes. An additional EGA on all inventories validated the AQ-SPQ-BR factor structure and revealed another community, Social Anxiety (L-SAS). A Network Analysis (NA) on all inventories revealed several moderately central subscales, which collectively reflected the social-interpersonal impairments of the three disorders. The current results suggest that a combination of recent network- and traditional factor-analytic techniques may present a fruitful approach to understanding the underlying structure as well as relation of different psychopathologies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
T.V. Avakyan ◽  
S.V. Volikova ◽  
M.G. Sorokova

The influence of a specific social development situation on the operational and motivational components of social cognition in orphan adolescents investigated. The theoretical basis of the study was the provisions of the "social situation of development" L.S. Vygotsky, theories of attachment by J. Bowlby, the multifactor model of social cognition A.B. Kholmogorova, O.V. Rychkova. 68 orphans aged from 10 to 17 years old living in the orphanage examined. It shown that orphaned teenagers with an insecure type of attachment have more difficulty in understanding their own feelings, regardless of the length of their stay in the institution. Orphans living in institutions for more than 5 years have a higher level of social anxiety and distress during social interaction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis-Joaquin Garcia-Lopez ◽  
Lourdes Espinosa-Fernandez ◽  
Jose-Antonio Muela-Martinez ◽  
Jose Antonio Piqueras

Despite the availability of efficacious treatment and screening protocols, social anxiety disorder (SAD) in adolescents is considerably under-detected and undertreated. Our main study objective was to examine a brief, valid, and reliable social anxiety measure already tested to serve as self-report child measure but administered via Internet aimed at listening to the ability of his or her parent to identify social anxiety symptomatology in his or her child. This parent version could be used as a complementary measure to avoid his or her overestimation of children of social anxiety symptomatology using traditional self-reported measures. We examined the psychometric properties of brief and valid social anxiety measure in their parent format and administered via the Internet. The sample included 179 parents/legal guardians of adolescents (67% girls) with a clinical diagnosis of SAD (mean age: 14.27; SD = 1.33). Findings revealed good factor structure, internal consistency, and construct validity. Data support a single, strength-based factor on the SPAIB-P, being structure largely invariant across age and gender. The limited number of adolescents with a performance-only specifier prevented examining the utility of scale to screen for this recently established specifier. It is crucial to evaluate if these results generalize to different cultures and community samples. The findings suggest that the SPAIB-P evidences performance comparable with child-reported measure. Parents can be reliable reports of the social anxiety symptomatology of the adolescent. The SPAIB-P may be useful for identifying clinically disturbed socially anxious adolescents.


2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document