Socially anxious adolescents’ perception of treatment by classmates

Abstract

This study addressed the question if socially anxious adolescents have a negatively biased perception of the way they are treated by their peers. A total of 998 high school students from Grades 8–10 were categorized as socially low, middle, or high anxious on the basis of their SAS-A score. The perceived behavior of classmates was measured using three lists that described class behaviors during oral presentations of students, one list was concerned with the behaviors directed towards the student him/herself and the other two with behaviors directed towards a hypothetical high and low socially anxious peer, respectively. The results indicated that high socially anxious students felt negatively treated by their peers and that the other students too perceived that socially anxious classmates were treated more negatively. This suggests that the perception of the high socially anxious students is not distorted but based on the actual treatment they receive from their classmates.

Introduction

This study was aimed at gaining more insight into the relation between social anxiety and perception of peer behavior. The main question asked was if socially anxious adolescents in comparison to the non-anxious students in their class have a negative perception of their classmates’ behavior directed towards them. Previous research has shown that socially anxious people display an information processing bias with regard to other persons’ reactions. Because socially anxious individuals have a negative opinion about their own performance, they assume that other people think in the same negative way about them and therefore interpret other persons’ behavior in a negative way; see Hirsch and Clark (2004) for a recent review of the literature. Two important cognitive models of social anxiety state that in an anxiety-provoking social situation, socially anxious individuals are self-focused and therefore do not pay due attention to social cues in other persons’ behavior (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). As a consequence, they are not easily corrected in their thinking when they are treated in a more positive way than they expect.

The negatively biased perception of socially anxious individuals has been demonstrated in several studies (e.g., Christensen, Stein, & Means-Christensen, 2003; Perowne & Mansell, 2002; Spence, Donovan, & Brechman-Toussaint, 1999). For example, Perowne and Mansell conducted a study that manipulated the behavior of the audience in order to investigate low and high socially anxious participants’ attention to social cues. The participants in that study were university students with non-clinical high and with low social anxiety. The participants gave a speech to a “make believe” audience that had been videotaped beforehand and that was presented to them as a live audience present in another room. Part of the confederates in the audience demonstrated negative behaviors, part showed positive behaviors, and part presented neutral cues. Overall, the high anxious participants rated the appreciation of their speech by the audience as negative and the low anxious participants rated the same responses of the same audience to their speech as positive. This is remarkable; the more so because the two groups did not differ as far as the detection of the emotional cues of the audience, like yawning, looking at watch, was concerned. Furthermore, the high anxious group perceived a difference in appreciation between the negatively behaving confederates on the one hand and the neutral and positively behaving confederates on the other hand. The low anxious group discriminated between the neutral and negative confederates on the one hand and the positive confederates on the other hand. This suggests that the high anxious participants’ interpretation of audience behavior was biased in the sense that it was based on the negatively behaving confederates and the low anxious participants’ interpretation on the positive confederates.

There is, however, also some research that appears to indicate that the socially anxious person's negative expectations of other people's judgments towards them are not entirely biased. For example, Norton and Hope (2001) asked adults with a social anxiety disorder, individuals with dysthymia, and non-clinical controls to give a speech and to take part in two role-playing situations. The authors compared persons’ self-ratings of social performance and anxiety with independent observer ratings. The findings indicated that the socially anxious group showed a negative bias in their self-ratings because they were more negative about their performance than the independent observers were. However, the results also showed that their negative self-evaluation was not completely unfounded. The observers did notice some differences in social performance between the three groups with the socially anxious group being rated more negatively than the other two groups. The authors therefore concluded that the negative self-image of socially anxious individuals could not completely be ascribed to distorted perceptions. There is a “kernel of truth” in their perceptions; that is to say that their negative self-ratings are at least partly accurate.

Christensen et al. (2003) further investigated this kernel-of-truth hypothesis contrasting it with the self-focused attention hypothesis. In their study, the perceptions of a non-clinical group of high socially anxious university students were compared to those of a control group of students with normal levels of social anxiety. In pairs of two the participants were asked to have a conversation with the other participant. Afterwards they rated their own performance, the performance of their partner, and the way they thought they were evaluated by their partner. It was found that the perceptions that the socially anxious participants had of other persons’ responses towards them were related to their own negative self-evaluations. Their interaction partners did not judge them in the negative way the socially anxious individuals assumed. However, their negative interpretations of their partner's evaluation of them were not completely unfounded. Their partners did rate them as more nervous and less sociable. So, the socially anxious students did have some reason to feel that other people had a negative opinion about them.

The kernel-of-truth hypothesis was also supported in the study by Spence et al. (1999). They told 7–14-year-old children–a group with social phobia and a group of normal controls–that they would be evaluated by peers. The children did a reading task and participated in role-playing tasks. In this study, the social phobic children did have a negative opinion about their own performance. Furthermore, it was clear from several sources, among which parents and independent raters, that the anxious children were indeed less competent as far as their social performance was concerned. Thus, their perception of their role-playing performance was not completely negatively biased. However, in the case of the reading task, their negative self-evaluations could not be explained by a poor reading performance suggesting that their perceptions were at least partly distorted.

The reported studies seem to indicate that socially anxious individuals, adults and children alike, have negatively biased opinions about their own role in social-evaluative situations. More specifically, socially anxious individuals think that their interaction partners have a low appreciation of their performance. At the same time, the studies suggest that the negative cognitions are not completely unfounded, as raters in most studies did report differences between anxious and non-anxious persons’ social behavior. Hence, there seems to be some truth in the negative self-evaluations of socially anxious individuals.

Studies on the biased perception of socially anxious persons like the ones reviewed above have exclusively focused on the evaluation of the socially anxious person's performance. Other people's behavior towards the socially anxious person was not included. This is remarkable; because it is not unlikely that other people's behavior actually causes or at least helps to maintain socially anxious individuals’ negative self-perception. Some studies show that the behavior directed to socially anxious individuals is relatively negative. For example, Strauss, Lahey, Frick, Frame, and Hynd (1988) showed that children with anxiety disorders were less liked and were neglected by their classmates. Spence et al. (1999) reported that socially anxious children were less positively treated in interactions with their peers than non-anxious children. Gazelle and Ladd (2003) found bi-directional relationships between anxious withdrawal and peer exclusion. Spence et al. and Gazelle and Ladd argued that children who keep to themselves a lot are seen as deviant and are therefore less liked and excluded. As a consequence, the anxious child is confirmed in his/her beliefs and reacts with even more social withdrawal. In short, these studies suggest that socially anxious persons might have some reason to be afraid of interacting with others and feel negatively evaluated.