The observer perspective: effects on social anxiety and performance
Introduction
Cognitive approaches to the understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders have become increasingly popular in recent years (see Clark & Wells, 1997 for a review). One recent influential model is the Clark and Wells (1995) model of social phobia. Social phobia is a common and disabling disorder (Marshall, 1996), involving fear and avoidance of social situations. People with social phobia believe they will behave in an embarrassing or socially unacceptable way, leading to disastrous consequences such as humiliation or rejection. These beliefs create anxiety. The Clark and Wells (1995) model of social phobia identifies four processes that contribute to maintenance of this anxiety.
First, when people with social phobia enter a social situation, they tend to focus attention on themselves as a social object, instead of focusing outwardly on the people around them. This attentional focus generates more anxiety because it prevents the person from perceiving any positive social feedback. Second, socially anxious individuals engage in “safety behaviours” such as avoiding eye contact so that they will not see disapproval in other people’s expressions, which they believe to be helpful, but in fact often exacerbate the problem, for example, they appear less friendly. Safety behaviours also serve to maintain the belief that social situations are dangerous, as the absence of the feared social catastrophe is attributed to the safety behaviour. Third, people with social phobia often experience anticipatory anxiety and engage in post-event reviews of social situations, both of which exacerbate their negative thinking and maintain a negative image of self. Fourth, anxiety resulting from the above processes sometimes produces actual deficits in social behaviour, and these deficits may lead to less effective social performance.
This study focuses on the first of the maintaining factors, namely the construction of the self as a social object. According to the Clark and Wells (1995) model, socially anxious individuals use internal information, such as their own thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations, to construct an impression of how they appear to others. This impression can take the form of a mental visual image, experienced from an “observer perspective”, in which individuals see themselves as though from another person’s viewpoint. This image is usually negative, for example, seeing the self in a humiliating posture, sweating profusely, but as the image is from the perspective of an observer, individuals assume that this is the actual image that is seen by other people (McEwan & Devins, 1983). The negative information about the self in the observer perspective image maintains anxiety, and the attentional focus on the self reduces the likelihood that any positive social feedback will be noticed.
Two studies provide support for the importance of the role of the observer perspective. Hackmann, Surawy, and Clark (1998) and Wells, Clark, and Ahmad (1998) found that people with social phobia were significantly more likely than controls to adopt the observer perspective when remembering images of difficult social situations. Controls used a “field perspective”, that is, their image of the situation was perceived as if they were viewing the scene from inside their own eyes, observing the details around them. A recent study (Coles, Turk, Heimberg, & Fresco, 2001) demonstrated that adopting the observer perspective may be a function of high anxiety. In their study, participants with social phobia were more likely to use the observer perspective when remembering high anxiety social situations compared to controls, but both groups were more likely to adopt a field perspective when remembering medium or low social anxiety situations.
Current evidence supporting the role of the observer perspective in maintaining social phobia and social anxiety is limited. However, theories of self-focused attention in the social psychological literature may provide some additional indirect evidence in support of the hypothesis. There are two relevant theories: Duval and Wicklund’s (1972) theory of Objective Self-Awareness and Carver and Scheier’s (1981) Cybernetic Model of Self-Attention. Both models propose that self-focused attention performs the function of monitoring an individual’s progress towards desired behavioural standards or goals. Duval and Wicklund (1972) propose a state of self-focused attention called objective self-awareness. Objective self-awareness is awareness of the self as an object in the world and in this state individuals often see themselves from an external viewpoint. This is similar to the Clark and Wells (1995) concept of the construction of the self as a social object and the observer perspective associated with it.
According to Duval and Wicklund (1972) this state of objective self-awareness is triggered when individuals feel that they may be evaluated along salient dimensions. For a socially phobic or socially anxious person, social situations contain the threat of evaluation along dimensions of social competence. This makes it more likely that high socially anxious people are triggered into using this objectively self-aware state in social situations. Studies have shown that the observer perspective is used more by individuals with social phobia than control groups without significant social-evaluative anxiety (Hackmann, Surawy and Clark, 1998, Wells and Papageorgiou, 1999). Duval and Wicklund (1972) believe that the state of objective self-awareness inevitably results in the perception of some negative discrepancy between the person’s actual behaviour and their desired behavioural standard. This negative evaluation of the self results in an uncomfortable affective state. If this theory is applied to social anxiety, it suggests that even low socially anxious people would evaluate themselves more negatively in social situations if they were to become self-aware by taking the observer perspective. However they are less likely to take the perspective spontaneously, as they do not anticipate failure in social situations.
Carver and Scheier’s (1981) theory is an extension of the Duval and Wicklund (1972) theory. It differs at the point where the self-aware individual perceives a negative discrepancy. According to Carver and Scheier (1981) negative affect is not inevitable. The extent to which people experience unpleasant affect depends upon their perception of their ability to reduce the discrepancy between their actual and desired social performance. If individuals believe they have the power to reduce the discrepancy, no further negative evaluation or negative affect will result. It is reasonable to suppose that people high in social anxiety would have lower expectancies of their ability to reduce a negative discrepancy between their actual social performance and their desired goal, as these individuals tend to have negative beliefs about their social ability (Clark & Wells, 1995). If negative affect is experienced, the person may escape the situation. If escape is impossible, he or she may mentally withdraw, which is likely to affect social performance. Low socially anxious people have more positive beliefs about their social ability and are more likely to believe that they can reduce the negative discrepancy. As a result low socially anxious individuals are less likely to be affected by self-focused attention.
The literature on self-focused attention indicates that self-focus is associated with negative self-related thoughts, increased anxiety and poor social performance (Woody, Chambless and Glass, 1997, Spurr and Stopa, 2002). Self-focused attention has been conceptualised as both a state and a trait. Fenigstein, Scheier and Buss (1975) argue that the consistent tendency of a person to attend to the self or to direct attention outwards is a trait, which they define as “self-consciousness”. In contrast, the experience of self-directed attention, which they describe as “self-awareness”, is a state and can be triggered either by situational variables or by dispositional (trait) factors. There is an additional distinction between public and private self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier and Buss, 1975, Buss, 1980). Public self-consciousness describes the extent to which individuals are aware of the outwardly observable aspects of the self, such as appearance and behaviour. Private self-consciousness describes the extent to which individuals focus on psychological aspects of themselves, such as thoughts, feelings and attitudes. The studies cited below have used the concept of public self-consciousness (or its state version, public self-awareness) rather than private self-consciousness, as public self-consciousness is the concept most similar to objective self-awareness and to the Clark and Wells (1995) description of the self as a social object. It is the effect of this awareness of the observable aspects of self on thinking, anxiety and behaviour that interests us here.
Self-focused attention has been linked to increased anxiety. Woody (1996) showed that a self-focus manipulation increased anticipatory, observer-rated and self-rated anxiety in a group made self-aware when sitting passively before an audience. In contrast, Franzoi and Brewer (1984) found that length of time spent in a public self-aware state did not increase negative affect, but in fact increased positive affect, which runs counter to the prediction made by Duval and Wicklund (1972). Interestingly, they also found that individuals, low in public self-consciousness (a trait) had more novel thoughts and feelings than individuals high in public self-consciousness. However, individuals high in public self-consciousness were less comfortable in the public self-aware state than participants low in public self-consciousness. Franzoi and Brewer argue that perhaps individuals low in trait self-consciousness experience more positive affect when they become self-aware because they avoid self-reflection when the content of this state becomes negative.
Hope and Heimberg (1988) looked at the relationship between public self-consciousness and anxiety and thinking in a social task. They found that participants who were high in public self-consciousness reported more negative self-related thoughts after a role-played social situation than participants who were low in public self-consciousness. High public self-consciousness was also related to poorer performance on a role-played social situation as judged by independent raters. By comparison, Burgio, Merluzzi, and Pryor (1986) found that a high self-focus condition resulted in significantly more negative and fewer positive thoughts for both high-anxious and low-anxious participants.
Studies also suggest that self-focused attention is associated with a more negative self-assessment of social performance. Daly, Vangelisti, and Lawrence (1989) found that self focus was related to a more negative self-assessment of performance, and poorer performance as assessed by independent raters, and that this effect was more pronounced in a high anxious group. Johnson and Glass (1989) found that participants in a ‘self-evaluative attention’ condition had significantly higher anxiety, both self and independent-rated, than in a non-evaluative condition. Participants also performed worse in the evaluative condition as measured by both self-ratings and judges’ ratings of conversational skill. In addition, high public self-consciousness was significantly correlated with the number of negative self-statements on a structured measure of task-related positive and negative self-statements.
More recently, Woody and Rodriguez (2000) showed that self-focused attention increased anxiety in a group of socially phobic individuals and in a control group, which would support Duval and Wicklund’s contention that self-focus inevitably produces negative affect. However, this increase in anxiety affected self-ratings of performance differently between the two groups. The non-anxious control group gave higher ratings of their performance than the socially phobic group, the control group’s ratings being closer to the observer ratings. Woody and Rodriguez suggest that self-focus might alter attributional biases and that socially phobic individuals might be heavily influenced by current and past attributions of social performance that are based on “a mental representation of how one appears to an observer” (p. 486). This would support the Clark and Wells (1995) proposition that socially anxious individuals have a negative and distorted image of self that affects their perception of social performance.
If the effects of the observer perspective are similar to the effects of self-focused attention or self-awareness in most of the studies cited above, then the observer perspective should increase anxiety and negative thinking and lead to a more negative assessment of performance than the field perspective. This is consistent with the Clark and Wells (1995) hypothesis that the observer perspective maintains negative thinking and therefore anxiety because it contains an excessively negative and distorted view of the self.
The aim of this study is to look at the effects of perspective taking in participants who are high and low in social-evaluative anxiety. The high and low social-evaluative anxiety groups were selected using the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (FNES: Watson & Friend, 1969). When participants from the normal population are divided into high and low social anxiety groups on the basis of their FNES scores, the effects of experimental manipulations mirror those that are found when social phobics are compared to non-patient controls (Stopa & Clark, 2001). Social fears and phobia have high prevalence rates, but relatively few affected individuals seek treatment (Chapman, Mannuzza, & Fyer, 1995). High socially anxious participants therefore represent a valid analogue of social phobia.
The social psychological theories cited above make different predictions about the effects of self-focus. Duval and Wicklund’s (1972) theory predicts that self-focus (including the observer perspective) is invariably negative. Carver and Scheier’s (1981) theory predicts that it is only negative when self-efficacy in the situation is low, as is likely to be the case in high socially anxious individuals. The Clark and Wells (1995) model predicts that the observer perspective would increase negative thinking and anxiety in high socially anxious individuals, but does not make predictions regarding its effects on those low in social anxiety. There is no evidence that evaluates the effect of low socially anxious participants taking the observer perspective. Precise predictions for the effects of the observer perspective on low socially anxious participants could therefore not be made. With regard to high socially anxious participants, the prediction was made that adopting the observer would impair them, as this assumption follows from all three models.
The study was designed to test the following hypotheses. The observer perspective will be associated with more negative cognitions, higher self-reported anxiety, increased safety behaviours and worse self-rated performance in a social situation than the field perspective in the high social-evaluative anxiety group. For the low social-evaluative anxiety group, it was assumed that the effects would either be negative, with similar effects as predicted for high socially anxious participants (following the theory of Duval & Wicklund, 1972), or that the observer perspective would have no effect (following the theory of Carver & Scheier, 1981). It was also predicted that underestimation of performance in comparison with an independent rater would take place in the observer condition to a greater extent than in the field condition, but this prediction was only made for the high social-evaluative anxiety group as evidence exists that high socially anxious people are more likely to underestimate performance (Stopa and Clark, 1993, Rapee and Lim, 1992, Mansell and Clark, 1999). Asking high and low social-evaluative anxiety groups to perform a speech twice; once using an observer perspective and once using a field perspective tested these hypotheses.
Section snippets
Participants
Two hundred and twenty-five undergraduate students were screened using the FNES (Watson & Friend, 1969). The FNES discriminates between social-evaluative anxiety and other forms of anxiety. The groups were selected using a method proposed by Stopa and Clark (2001). Students who scored 20 or above (upper quartile: high FNES group) or 8 or below (lower quartile: low FNES group) were approached and asked to take part in the study. They were given an information sheet, and if they agreed to
Participant characteristics
Table 1 shows the mean scores for the high and low FNE groups on a range of anxiety measures. Scores were compared using a multivariate analysis of variance and the results are reported in Table 1. As expected, the high FNE group scored significantly higher on all of the social anxiety measures (SIAS, SPS and SBQ). The mean score of the high FNE group was similar to a clinical sample of social phobics on the SIAS which is a measure of general social interaction anxiety, but was lower than the
Discussion
The aim of this study was to look at the effect of perspective on participants who were high and low in social anxiety. The specific hypotheses derived from Clark and Wells’ cognitive model of social phobia were that participants high in social anxiety would report more negative cognitions, higher anxiety and worse self rated performance in the observer perspective than in the field perspective. Predictions about the effect of the observer perspective on the low social anxiety group were less
Conclusion
According to Clark and Wells’ (1995) model of social phobia, the image of the self in the observer perspective contains negative information that maintains anxiety in socially anxious individuals. The results of this study are consistent with this hypothesis. Adopting the observer perspective led to an increase in the frequency of negative thoughts and of safety behaviours in both groups and there were clear trends indicating an increase in belief in negative thoughts and an increase in anxiety
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