Social Anxiety and Social Perception: Construing Others' Reactions to the Self

This study investigated whether socially anxious people differ from less socially anxious people in how they interpret the facial expressions of an interaction partner. Undergraduates answered a series of questions about themselves in a structured interview, replying to what they thought was the TV image of another undergraduate but was actually a videotape. The videotaped interviewer either maintained a consistently neutral facial expression or varied in expression (positive, neutral, negative) across three blocks of questions and answers. After each block, subjects rated the interviewer's approval of and interest in them. Analysis of these ratings revealed that the two social anxiety groups were equivalently responsive to changes in facial expression. Independent of this, socially anxious subjects made ratings that were consistently less favorable than the ratings made by subjects lower in social anxiety. Additional analyses tended to support the most straightforward interpretation of this finding: that persons high in social anxiety construe others' reactions to them more negatively than persons low in social anxiety.