Characterizing the dark side of social anxiety in adolescence: A replication and extension study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social anxiety (SA) typically presents as shy, risk-averse behavior, yet a subset of SA individuals display impulsivity and aggression, suggesting that fear of rejection may sometimes be managed through externalizing responses. Interestingly, similar interpersonal reactivity appears in vulnerable narcissism. Narcissism comprises grandiose (confident, self-assured) and vulnerable (hypersensitive, insecure) facets. Because SA and narcissistic traits both share concerns about social evaluation but manifest differently, examining their intersection in adolescence may clarify SA symptomology. Here we used latent profile analysis to identify subgroups based on SA, vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, impulsivity, and aggression in 298 adolescents ( M age = 14.44 years, SD = 1.76; 46.5% boys). Three profiles emerged with sequentially increasing externalizing behavior. Profile 1 (45.64%) demonstrated low levels of SA, narcissism, and externalizing behavior. Profile 2 (29.53%) was characterized by high SA and vulnerable narcissism, but low impulsivity/aggression, aligning with the prototypical inhibited subtype. Profile 3 (24.83%) displayed moderate SA but the highest levels of narcissism, impulsivity, and aggression, with boys being more likely to belong to this profile. These findings replicate prior adult research (i.e., Villalongo Andino et al., 2024 ) demonstrating that narcissistic traits differentiate an angry-impulsive SA subtype, suggesting that narcissism may underlie the approach–avoidance conflicts contributing to atypical adolescent SA symptomology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".