By: Bethany West
According to Dr. Thomas A. Richards from The Social Anxiety Institute, social anxiety is the often irrational “fear of being judged and evaluated negatively by other people.”
Social anxiety makes many of us feel out of place, but our interactions are not as odd or awkward as we think, and others’ perceptions of us do not seem to be influenced by our social anxiety. At least, not according to the two research studies posted in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior by Professor Corine Dijk and her colleagues.
In the first study, Dijk and colleagues studied whether social anxiety affected an individual’s nonverbal skills at mimicking others’ expressions and “catching” others’ emotions—i.e., if others’ emotions were just as contagious to socially anxious people as people who weren’t socially anxious. They found that socially anxious people did not tend to act differently in these ways, at least not perceivably.
The second study investigated perceptions of people with social anxiety. As a socially anxious individual myself, this second study mattered more to me because it explored my greatest fear: do others see my social anxiety, and am I more alienated because of it? Furthermore, it addressed the actual issue of social anxiety: fear of judgement or being disliked.
Fortunately, the researchers found that people did not seem to view the participants who were socially anxious worse than others. The findings of these studies, especially the second one, seem to indicate that social anxiety is not this big blaring warning sign that I, and I believe many others, believed it was.
Let’s get more into this, starting with the first study. Participants for this study were 105 freshmen psychology students who were invited based on their scores on the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale—the 25% highest and 50% lowest scores. These participants then filled out questionnaires and were recorded watched films of actors making certain facial expressions. Their expressions in the recordings were then coded using the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox to determine whether their expressions mimicked those on the screen.
The films were also sectioned by types of emotion, and after each emotion section the participants were asked to fill out a survey on how they felt to see whether the emotion of that section “spread” to the participant.
While socially anxious people did tend to catch negative emotions more readily than others and were not affected by positive emotions as much as others, they still found that others’ emotions were contagious to socially anxious people, and there was no evidence that facial mimicry was affected by social anxiety. In other words, while we socially anxious people might feel worse, outwardly we react just as everyone else. Our nonverbal communication skills in facial mimicry are not influenced by anxiety and that anxiety is more of a psychological distraction to being emotionally engaged rather than a visual, social handicap. The second study emphasizes this fact even further.
As mentioned before, the second study was all about others’ perceptions of the participants and whether social anxiety influenced those perceptions. They had actresses who were unaware of the aims of the research tell the participants how to play an intentionally anxiety-inducing, silly game and the participants were told they would have to play the game afterwards. Only the faces of the participants and the actresses were visible to each other to control for physical looks affecting the study. Their faces were recorded once more to code their expressions again. Before and after these interactions with participants, the actresses were asked to judge the participants. With this study they did find that social anxiety had some influence on facial mimicry, but only with polite smiles. Particularly, socially anxious people offered polite smiles more often than others.
Possible reasoning offered by researchers for the increase in polite smiles is that socially anxious individuals strive to hide that anxiety with those smiles. As a socially anxious person, I can confirm that this is the case with me. As far as the main goal of this second study, they found that the actresses’ perceptions were not influenced by a person’s social anxiety. In other words, while socially anxious people did try to be more polite and friendly with their smiles, their social anxiety did not cause the actresses to judge them differently. For me, this was the most important finding of these two studies as it suggests that social anxiety was either imperceivable to the actresses or it just didn’t impact their opinions. Both options are reassuring and once again indicate that social anxiety is largely an internal battle.
What does this all mean? Well, one thing it means is that socially anxious people do not stick out or drive others away, at least not with our facial expressions. Another thing to take away from all this is that social anxiety does affect our ability to be influenced by others’ emotions, particularly negative ones. All of this indicates that social anxiety is mostly internal, psychological conflict. Ultimately, acknowledging the fact that our social anxiety does not physically show or affect others’ opinions is a good start to combating this psychological handicap because it addresses the core issue of social anxiety, according to Dr. Richards’ definition: fear of how others see us.