scholarly journals Social context and the real-world consequences of social anxiety

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (12) ◽  
pp. 1989-2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juyoen Hur ◽  
Kathryn A. DeYoung ◽  
Samiha Islam ◽  
Allegra S. Anderson ◽  
Matthew G. Barstead ◽  
...  

AbstractBackgroundSocial anxiety lies on a continuum, and young adults with elevated symptoms are at risk for developing a range of psychiatric disorders. Yet relatively little is known about the factors that govern the hour-by-hour experience and expression of social anxiety in the real world.MethodsHere we used smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to intensively sample emotional experience across different social contexts in the daily lives of 228 young adults selectively recruited to represent a broad spectrum of social anxiety symptoms.ResultsLeveraging data from over 11 000 real-world assessments, our results highlight the central role of close friends, family members, and romantic partners. The presence of such close companions was associated with enhanced mood, yet socially anxious individuals had fewer confidants and spent less time with the close companions that they do have. Although higher levels of social anxiety were associated with a general worsening of mood, socially anxious individuals appear to derive larger benefits – lower levels of negative affect, anxiety, and depression – from their close companions. In contrast, variation in social anxiety was unrelated to the amount of time spent with strangers, co-workers, and acquaintances; and we uncovered no evidence of emotional hypersensitivity to these less-familiar individuals.ConclusionsThese findings provide a framework for understanding the deleterious consequences of social anxiety in emerging adulthood and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juyoen Hur ◽  
Kathryn A. DeYoung ◽  
Samiha Islam ◽  
Allegra S. Anderson ◽  
Matthew Barstead ◽  
...  

Social anxiety lies on a continuum, and young adults with elevated symptoms are at risk for developing a range of debilitating psychiatric disorders. Yet, relatively little is known about the factors that govern the hour-by-hour experience and expression of social anxiety in daily life. Here, we used smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to intensively sample emotional experience across different social contexts in the daily lives of 228 young adults selectively recruited to represent a broad spectrum of social anxiety symptoms. Leveraging data from over 11,000 real-world assessments, results highlight the central role of close friends, family members, and romantic partners. The presence of close companions is associated with enhanced mood, yet socially anxious individuals have smaller confidant networks and spend less time with their close companions. Although higher levels of social anxiety are associated with a general worsening of mood, socially anxious individuals appear to derive larger benefits—lower levels of negative affect, anxiety, and depression—from the presence of their closest companions. In contrast, variation in social anxiety was unrelated to the amount of time spent with strangers, co-workers, and acquaintances; and we uncovered no evidence of emotional hypersensitivity to less-familiar individuals. Collectively, these findings provide a framework for understanding the deleterious consequences of social anxiety in emerging adulthood and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Shackman ◽  
Jennifer S. Weinstein ◽  
Stanton N. Hudja ◽  
Conor D. Bloomer ◽  
Matthew Barstead ◽  
...  

Dispositional negativity—the tendency to experience more frequent or intense negative emotions—is a fundamental dimension of temperament and personality. Elevated levels of dispositional negativity have profound consequences for public health and wealth, drawing the attention of researchers, clinicians, and policy makers. Yet, relatively little is known about the factors that govern the momentary expression of dispositional negativity in the real world. Here, we used smart phone-based experience-sampling to demonstrate that the social environment plays a central role in shaping the moment-by-moment emotional experience of 127 young adults selectively recruited to represent a broad spectrum of dispositional negativity. Results indicate that individuals with a more negative disposition derive much larger emotional benefits from the company of close companions—friends, romantic partners, and family members—and that these benefits reflect heightened feelings of social connection and acceptance. These results set the stage for developing improved interventions and provide new insights into the interaction of emotional traits and situations in the real world, close to clinically and practically important endpoints.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Shackman

Dispositional negativity—the tendency to experience more frequent or intense negative emotions—is a fundamental dimension of temperament and personality. Elevated levels of dispositional negativity have profound consequences for public health and wealth, drawing the attention of researchers, clinicians, and policy makers. Yet, relatively little is known about the factors that govern the momentary expression of dispositional negativity in the real world. Here, we used smart phone-based experience-sampling to demonstrate that the social environment plays a central role in shaping the moment-by-moment emotional experience of 127 young adults selectively recruited to represent a broad spectrum of dispositional negativity. Results indicate that individuals with a more negative disposition derive much larger emotional benefits from the company of close companions—friends, romantic partners, and family members—and that these benefits reflect heightened feelings of social connection and acceptance. These results set the stage for developing improved interventions and provide new insights into the interaction of emotional traits and situations in the real world, close to clinically and practically important end-points.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-251
Author(s):  
Anthony Pavlik

Fantasy other worlds are often seen as alternative, wholly ‘other’ locations that operate as critiques of the ‘real’ world, or provide spaces where child protagonists can take advantage of the otherness they encounter in their own process of growth. Rather than consider fantasy fiction's presentations of ‘other’ worlds in this way, this article proposes reading them as potential thirdspaces of performance and activity that are neutral rather than confrontational such that, in fantasy other world fiction for children and young adults, the putative ‘other’ world may not, in fact, be ‘other’ at all.


AKSEN ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Andrey Caesar Effendi ◽  
LMF Purwanto

The use of digital technology today can be said to be inseparable in our daily lives. Digital technology isslowly changing the way we communicate with others and the environment. Socialization that is usuallyface-to-face in the real world now can be done to not having to meet face-to-face in cyberspace. Thisliterature review aims to see a change in the way of obtaining data that is growing, with the use of digitaltechnology in ethnographic methods. The method used in this paper is to use descriptive qualitativeresearch methods by analyzing the existing literature. So it can be concluded that the use of digitalethnography in the architectural programming process can be a new way of searching for data at thearchitectural programming stage.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 1094-1108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miranda ◽  
Stephanie E. Wemm ◽  
Hayley Treloar Padovano ◽  
Ryan W. Carpenter ◽  
Noah N. Emery ◽  
...  

Theories of addiction posit that stimuli associated with drug use, including both exteroceptive (e.g., paraphernalia) and interoceptive (e.g., feeling tense or stressed), evoke craving and contribute to the pathogenesis of substance misuse. Control over drug cue response and stress is essential for moderating use. Building from laboratory data supporting associations between cue exposure, stress, and craving, this study tested whether these associations generalize to real-world settings and examined whether a well-vetted neurocognitive control capacity (i.e., working memory, or WM) moderated associations. Youths ( N = 85; 15–24 years old) completed baseline and ecological momentary assessments. Cue exposure and participants’ average stress predicted higher craving. Youths with weaker WM experienced stronger craving at higher-stress moments but not when faced with cues. Interactions were present for both previous-moment and same-moment stress. Craving among adolescents with stronger WM was not swayed by momentary stress. Findings suggest that stronger WM protects against craving at more stressful moments.


2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (8) ◽  
pp. 1658-1667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Ruffman ◽  
Jamin Halberstadt ◽  
Janice Murray ◽  
Fiona Jack ◽  
Tina Vater

Abstract Objectives We examined empathic accuracy, comparing young versus older perceivers, and young versus older emoters. Empathic accuracy is related to but distinct from emotion recognition because perceiver judgments of emotion are based, not on what an emoter looks to be feeling, but on what an emoter says s/he is actually feeling. Method Young (≤30 years) and older (≥60 years) adults (“emoters”) were unobtrusively videotaped while watching movie clips designed to elicit specific emotional states. The emoter videos were then presented to young and older “perceivers,” who were instructed to infer what the emoters were feeling. Results As predicted, older perceivers’ empathic accuracy was less accurate relative to young perceivers. In addition, the emotions of young emoters were considerably easier to read than those of older emoters. There was also some evidence of an own-age advantage in emotion recognition in that older adults had particular difficulty assessing emotion in young faces. Discussion These findings have important implications for real-world social adjustment, with older adults experiencing a combination of less emotional transparency and worse understanding of emotional experience.


K ta Kita ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-128
Author(s):  
Edlyn Gracia Soewarsono

This creative work is about a young adult who is excited to explore her identity of someone who has a magical ability. It explores the issue of identities in young adults and its correlation to rebellion in the form of running away, which is common in Indonesia. It aims to bring the readers alongside the main character on her journey of exploring her identity, as well as dealing with her parents’ rejection of the identity that she is most comfortable in. To further understand how she deals with her parents’ pressure to take an identity she does not like, Erik Erikson’s fifth psychosocial stage—Identity vs. Role confusion is used as the first theory of this work. The second theory, James Marcia’s identity status, is used to understand how the main character explores her identity in different statuses. The genre of this creative work is low fantasy, which is a subgenre of fantasy that uses minimal magical elements and is set in the real world.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruksana Shaukat Jali ◽  
Nejra Van Zalk ◽  
David Boyle

BACKGROUND Subclinical (i.e., threshold) social anxiety can greatly affect young people’s lives, but existing solutions appear inadequate considering its rising prevalence. Wearable sensors may provide a novel way to detect social anxiety and result in new opportunities for monitoring and treatment that would be greatly beneficial for sufferers, society and healthcare services. Nevertheless, indicators such as skin temperature from wrist-worn sensors have not been used in prior work on physiological social anxiety detection. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to investigate whether subclinical social anxiety in young adults can be detected using physiological data obtained from wearable sensors, including Heart Rate (HR), Skin Temperature (ST) and Electrodermal Activity (EDA). METHODS Young adults (N = 12) with self-reported subclinical social anxiety (measured by the widely used self-reported version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, LSAS-SR) participated in an impromptu speech task. Physiological data was collected using an E4 Empatica wearable device. Using the pre-processed data and following a supervised machine learning approach, various classification algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) were used to develop models for three different contexts. Models were trained to (1) classify between baseline and socially anxious states, (2) differentiate between baseline, anticipation anxiety and reactive anxiety states, and (3) classify between social anxiety experienced by individuals with differing social anxiety severity. The predictive capability of the singular modalities was also explored in each of the three supervised learning experiments. The generalisability of the developed models was evaluated using 10-fold cross validation as a performance index. RESULTS With modalities combined, the developed models yielded accuracies between 97.54% and 99.48% when detecting between baseline and socially anxious states. Models trained to differentiate between baseline, anticipation anxiety and reactive anxiety states yielded accuracies between 95.18% and 98.10%. Alongside this, the models developed to detect between social anxiety experienced by individuals with differing anxiety severity scores successfully classified with accuracies between 98.86% and 99.52%. Surprisingly, EDA was identified as the most effective singular modality when differentiating between baseline and social anxiety states, whereas ST was the most effective modality when differentiating between anxiety experienced by individuals with differing social anxiety severity. CONCLUSIONS The results indicate that it is possible to accurately detect social anxiety as well as distinguish between levels of severity in young adults by leveraging physiological data collected from wearable sensors.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Jaisal T. Merchant ◽  
Erin K. Moran ◽  
Michael J. Strube ◽  
Deanna M. Barch

Abstract Background Deficits in goal-directed behavior (i.e. behavior conducted to achieve a specific goal or outcome) are core to schizophrenia, difficult to treat, and associated with poor functional outcomes. Factors such as negative symptoms, effort-cost decision-making, cognition, and functional skills have all been associated with goal-directed behavior in schizophrenia as indexed by clinical interviews or laboratory-based tasks. However, little work has examined whether these factors relate to the real-world pursuit of goal-directed activities in this population. Methods This study aimed to fill this gap by using Ecological Momentary Assessment (four survey prompts per day for 1 week) to test hypotheses about symptom, effort allocation, cognitive, and functional measures associated with planned and completed goal-directed behavior in the daily lives of 63 individuals with schizophrenia. Results Individuals with schizophrenia completed more goal-directed activities than they planned [t(62) = −4.01, p < 0.001]. Motivation and pleasure (i.e. experiential) negative symptoms, controlling for depressive symptoms, negatively related to planned goal-directed behavior [odds ratio (OR) 0.92, p = 0.005]. Increased effort expenditure for high probability rewards (planned: OR 1.01, p = 0.034, completed: OR 1.01, p = 0.034) along with performance on a daily functional skills task (planned: OR 1.04, p = 0.002, completed: OR 1.03, p = 0.047) negatively related to both planned and completed goal-directed activity. Conclusions Our results present correlates of real-world goal-directed behavior that largely align with impaired ability to make future estimations in schizophrenia. This insight could help identify targeted treatments for the elusive motivated behavior deficits in this population.


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