Socially Anxious Individuals’ Conflicted Emotional and Cognitive Responses to Self-Verifying and Self-Enhancing Others

This study investigated how individuals with social anxiety respond to others who provide them with positive (self-enhancing) or negative (self-verifying) feedback. The findings are based on data from 276 undergraduate students (74 males and 202 females). Participants completed a standardized measure of social anxiety and then answered questions about themselves in front of a one-way mirror. They received positive and negative written feedback on their social abilities supposedly from two student observers on the other side of the mirror. The feedback was actually predetermined and identical across participants. Experimenters instructed participants to consider each feedback paragraph and then imagine interacting with the respective observer. Participants rated their interest in contact with each observer, their emotional response, their guesses about the observer’s traits, their perception of the observer’s expectations of them and their perception of their own social ability. Regardless of social anxiety, participants reported more interest in further contact with the observer who provided positive, as opposed to negative, feedback. When participants with high social anxiety imagined interacting with the observer who provided positive, as opposed to negative, feedback they experienced more positive emotion; however, they rated this observer to be significantly less astute and trustworthy than the observer who provided negative feedback. Further, they thought they were more likely to fail to meet the positive observer’s favourable expectations, than the negative observer’s low expectations of them in the future. Participants with high social anxiety show evidence of a cognitive-affective crossfire (Swann, Griffin, Predmore, & Gaines, 1987) with emotional responses favouring self-enhancement strivings and cognitive responses favouring self-verification strivings. In contrast, participants with mid and low social anxiety reported emotional responses and observer ratings that were congruent and positive towards the observer who gave positive feedback, and vice versa for the observer who gave negative feedback. Thus, individuals with high social anxiety's interest in and emotional response to others who provided positive and negative feedback were similar to individuals with mid or low anxiety. Their cognitive attributions, however, differed and may play a role in maintaining their negative self-views and complicating their interpersonal interactions.