AI Article Synopsis

  • Socially anxious adolescents often use avoidance strategies, like avoiding eye contact and rehearsing conversation, to cope with anxiety-provoking situations.
  • A study involving 134 adolescents aged 14 to 15 examined the relationship between safety behaviors and various impairments in functioning.
  • Results indicated that those with high safety behaviors and social anxiety had more significant psychosocial difficulties, evaluative fears, and deficits in social skills compared to their peers, highlighting the need for better approaches to assess and treat social anxiety in adolescents.

Article Abstract

Socially anxious adolescents often endure anxiety-provoking situations using : strategies for minimizing in-the-moment distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact, rehearsing statements before entering a conversation). Studies linking safety behaviors to impaired functioning have largely focused on adults. In a sample of one hundred thirty-four 14 to 15 year-old adolescents, we tested whether levels of safety behaviors among socially anxious adolescents relate to multiple domains of impaired functioning. Adolescents, parents, and research personnel completed survey measures of safety behaviors and social anxiety, adolescents and parents reported about adolescents' evaluative fears and psychosocial impairments, and adolescents participated in a set of tasks designed to simulate social interactions with same-age, unfamiliar peers. Relative to other adolescents in the sample, adolescents high on both safety behaviors and social anxiety displayed greater psychosocial impairments, evaluative fears, and observed social skills deficits within social interactions. These findings have important implications for assessing and treating adolescent social anxiety.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/01454455211054019DOI Listing

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