Poster #83 - Understanding the discrepancy between children’s self-reported social anxiety and observed social engagement

• In Event: Poster Session 07

Abstract

Social anxiety is characterized by a fear of social situations in which one may be negatively perceived and evaluated by others (American Psychological Association, 2013). Previous work shows that girls report higher social anxiety symptomology than boys (e.g., La Greca & Lopez, 1998). However, girls are also observed to be more socially engaged than boys (e.g., Green, 2022). This discrepancy violates our expectations of socially anxious individuals and suggests that girls may be socialized mask anxiety during social interactions. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 2001) and recent findings (e.g., Poole & Schmidt, 2019) suggest that expressing positive affect (e.g., a smile) may be adaptive for socially anxious children, especially in stressful social situations. The present study merged findings from the social anxiety and social engagement literatures to (1) quantify the discrepancy between self-reported social anxiety and observers’ ratings of social engagement during a social stressor (i.e., interaction with an unfamiliar peer) and (2) examine how gender and expressed affect relates to this discrepancy.
Participants included 62 children (36 females; Mage = 10.18, SD = .79) who were observed while interacting with an unfamiliar age- and gender-matched peer during a 5-minutes unstructured laboratory task (Usher et al., 2018). Children’s social engagement and frequency of expressed positive affect were coded during the task by two independent teams of coders. Three global codes (Openness, Social Ease, and Appropriateness of Conversation; ICCs > .78.) were averaged to create a composite of social engagement. Positive affect was coded along with negative and neutral affect using a mutually exclusive, event-based approach (κ = .71). Children also self-reported on their symptoms of social anxiety (Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders; Birmaher et al., 1999).
We found that girls scored significantly higher than boys on both social anxiety (p = .038) and social engagement (p = .007). To quantify the discrepancy, social anxiety was regressed onto social engagement (Buzzell et al., 2017), where residual scores represented the difference between predicted social engagement scores and observers actual scores. Positive residual scores indicated that children displayed more social engagement than would be predicted based on social anxiety scores. A hierarchical regression was used to assess the impact of gender and positive affect on the discrepancy. In the first step, gender contributed significantly to the model (p = .005), with the discrepancy being positive for girls (M = 0.28), and negative for boys (M = -0.45). The addition of positive affect significantly improved the model (p = .026). Children who expressed higher frequencies of positive affect had positive discrepancy scores. When both predictors were included in the model, gender was no longer a significant predictor of the discrepancy (p = .19).
Our findings showed that while girls report higher levels of social anxiety than boys, they were also observed to be more socially engaged. Moreover, these findings suggest that expressing positive affect may be a method of social self-regulation for socially anxious children, allowing them to expand their capacity for social engagement during a peer interaction.

Authors

• Sarah D English, University of Waterloo
  Presenting Author

• Linda Sosa-Hernandez, University of Waterloo

• Emma Sophia Green, University of Waterloo

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo