Poster #230 - Shyness and Psychological Difficulties during Adolescence: The Impact of Friend Shyness and Self-Silencing

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Shyness is a strong risk factor for psychological difficulties, including depression, anxiety, and loneliness, during childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood (Rubin, Coplan, & Bowker, 2009). These psychological difficulties are explained, in part, by peer difficulties that shy youth oftentimes encounter at the group-level of social complexity, such as peer exclusion (e.g., Gazelle & Rudolph, 2004). Recent evidence indicates that certain features of friendship experiences (at the dyadic-level of social complexity), such as mutual friendship involvement, also help to explain the psychological problems associated with shyness during adolescence (Markovic & Bowker, 2017). Limited data, however, exist on the significance of other commonly studied friendship features, such as friend characteristics and relationship processes/qualities, which also have been shown to explain variability in psychological adjustment during adolescence (Hartup, 1996; Rubin, Bukowski, & Bowker, 2015). This study addresses this gap by utilizing dyadic analyses to evaluate the contribution of friend shyness to the psychological difficulties associated with shyness. Also considered is whether a certain relationship process, self-silencing (or the tendency to withhold thoughts and feelings; Jack, 1991), which has previously been associated with internalizing-related difficulties (e.g., Thomas & Bowker, 2015), mediates these associations.
Participants were 178 young adolescents (89 mutual best friend undistinguishable dyads; 54% female; Mage = 13.71 years; 24% ethnic minority) who completed widely-employed self-report measures of shyness, self-silencing, loneliness, and depressive and anxious symptoms. Actor-partner interdependence mediation modeling (Lederman, Macho, & Kenny, 2011), using maximum likelihood estimation in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2011), evaluated the hypothesized models and demonstrated acceptable fit to the data, χ²(15) = 15.51, p > .05, CFI = 0.99, SRMR = 0.06, RMSEA = 0.02 (90% CI [0.00,0.10]). When depressive symptoms was the outcome, significant actor and partner effects for shyness emerged (Figure 1). Significant actor (but not partner) effects emerged for shyness in relation to anxiety (Figure 2) and loneliness (β = 0.53, p < .001). Actor (but not partner) shyness was related to self-silencing. Hypothesized indirect effects were evaluated with bootstrap sampling and 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals. Actor self-silencing emerged as a significant mediator of the link between actor shyness and anxiety (β = -0.06, 95% CI = -0.11,-0.01; Figure 2), but not between actor shyness and depressive symptoms or loneliness. Partner self-silencing was not a significant mediator (β’s= -0.02-0.01). Moderation by gender was evaluated but no evidence of moderation was found (Δχ2(14) = 11.60, p > .05).
Results suggest that a complete understanding of the ways in which friendships “matter” in the lives of shy young adolescents requires a dyadic perspective that considers the characteristics of both members of the friendship alongside relationship processes. However, results also suggest that the impact of having shy friends may vary across psychological outcomes. Findings regarding self-silencing are novel and may suggest that many shy young adolescents withhold their thoughts and feelings due to their own fears and anxieties, which in turn, may contribute to their anxieties and at the same time, prevent them from experiencing the anxiety-relieving aspects of many close friendships (Wood et al., 2015).

Authors

• Miriam T Stotsky, University at Buffalo, SUNY
  Presenting Author

• Julie C Bowker, University at Buffalo, SUNY
  Non-Presenting Author