Encouraging a Peer in Need: The Impacts of Social Anxiety and Peer Familiarity

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Moderate levels of arousal in response to seeing others in need are optimal for motivating prosocial behavior (Eisenberg et al., 1989). Children high in social anxiety are less responsive to others in need, presumably because their over-arousal causes them to focus on alleviating their own distress rather than helping others (Young et al., 1999). But, the association between social anxiety and prosociality may depend on interpersonal context—such as one’s familiarity with the other and the other’s level of need. Using observational methods and a dyadic framework, we examined whether children’s social anxiety varies the relation between how much support a peer seeks (while preparing for a stressful task) and how much encouragement a child provides, and whether this link changes based on peer familiarity.

Participants were 444 10-year-old children (Mage= 10.18; 52% female). A third of these children (n= 151; henceforth target) came to the laboratory for two sessions to interact with a same-age and same-sex peer: one session was with a target-chosen friend (n= 149) and another with an unfamiliar peer (n= 144). After a brief introduction, an experimenter told the target they had two minutes to prepare a speech to be video recorded and presented to other children, and that their peer could help them prepare if they’d like. After the target’s speech, the other child was asked to prepare a speech. During preparations, we coded how much each speech-giver sought support from their peer on a 5-point scale (1= Not at all; 5= Very often) and the number of times the other child provided encouragement. Three coders reliably scored these behaviors (ICCs= .858 and .912, respectively). Children reported on their social anxiety using the Social Phobia subscale of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (Birmaher et al., 1997; Cronbach’s α= .76).

Targets and friends sought more support (t(140)= 4.190, p< .001; t(290)= 3.311, p= .001) and provided more encouragement (t(140)= 4.190, p< .001; t(289)= 5.831, p< .0001) to one another relative to interactions between targets and unfamiliar peers. We ran a reciprocal one-with-many dyadic structural equation model (Kenny et al., 2006) to analyze how children’s social anxiety, peers’ support seeking, and their interaction related to children’s encouragement, while controlling for earlier seeking and encouragement. In both dyads, encouragement was positively related to support seeking (ps< .001). In familiar dyads, however, one’s own social anxiety moderated the link between support seeking and encouragement (ps= .021): at high levels of seeking children high in social anxiety encouraged less than those children low in social anxiety, but at low levels there were no differences in encouraging between groups (see Figure 1). In unfamiliar dyads, this interaction had no effect (ps= .741).

In sum, our findings demonstrate that the relation between social anxiety and prosocial behavior is dependent on context. We interpret these findings as suggesting that in situations of need that are less arousing—such as when a friend seeks relatively little support—socially anxious children experience levels of arousal more conducive to behaving prosocially.

Authors

• Sebastian P Dys, University of Waterloo
  Presenting Author

• Catherine Burrows, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lauren V. Usher, Gener8tor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nathan A Fox, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author