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Socially Withdrawn and Isolated Children

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Handbook of Social and Evaluation Anxiety

Abstract

The term social withdrawal can be found frequently in the clinical literature on adults and children over several decades. Social withdrawal, as a symptom or a condition, denotes either a disruption to social relations or failure to interact with others. Applied to children, social withdrawal has multiple connotations that include avoidance of children’s play activities, low interaction rate across settings, exclusion by peers, poor social skills, unpopularity, shyness, loneliness, and feelings of alienation or rejection. However, most children who might be considered socially withdrawn or isolated do not fit all of these descriptors, nor are all these dimensions highly correlated in the general child population. It is this diversity of conceptualization that plagues the definitional, assessment, etiological, and treatment research on childhood social withdrawal and isolation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, 29208, USA

    Ronald J. Prinz

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  1. Ronald J. Prinz
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA

    Harold Leitenberg

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© 1990 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Prinz, R.J. (1990). Socially Withdrawn and Isolated Children. In: Leitenberg, H. (eds) Handbook of Social and Evaluation Anxiety. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2504-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2504-6_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-2506-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-2504-6

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