The Anxious Mind: Examining the relationships between social anxiety and social cognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considerable research has suggested that individuals with higher social anxiety (SA) tend to have poorer social cognitive skills (e.g. Israelashvili et al., 2024; Kim et al., 2023; Lacombe et al., 2024; Song et al., 2022; Warnock-Parkes et al., 2020). Yet, research in this area is exceedingly mixed (e.g., Alvi et al., 2022; Pittelkow et al., 2021; Zhao et al., 2014). For example, studies have found that individuals with social anxiety symptoms are more likely to misclassify or misinterpret social cues as negative or threatening (Gutiérrez-García & Calvo, 2017; Peschard & Philippot, 2017; Yoon et al., 2014). However, other findings indicate that those with higher levels of SA pay closer attention to cues from social partners for fear of embarrassment, resulting in greater accuracy in interpreting the emotions or intentions of others (Arrais et al., 2010; Joormann & Gotlib, 2006; Tibi-Elhanany & Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). One possible explanation for these mixed results is that the relationship between social anxiety and social cognitive abilities depends upon the type of social cognitive ability investigated (and/or the type of social cognitive task being used). A second possible explanation for these mixed results is that the relationship between social anxiety and social cognitive abilities depends upon the aspect of social anxiety investigated (and/or the type of anxiety measure being used). These possibilities are also not mutually exclusive leading to a third possibility: That both the type of social cognitive ability and the type of social anxiety influence the nature of the relationship. The current research examines these possibilities focusing on 2 main research questions (RQs). RQ1: Do levels of social anxiety (SA) predict scores on social cognitive tasks in children? And if they do, as hypothesized, a) what is the nature of those predictive relationships; and b) which aspects of social anxiety (i.e., the anxiety versus the social avoidance) are most predictive of social cognitive performance? RQ2: How do different aspects of children’s social cognitive abilities correlate with one another? Specifically, we investigated 3 aspects of children’s social cognitive abilities: 1) the tendency to engage in social perspective taking (using our child-friendly modification of the self-report measure the FIMI; Clutterbuck et al., 2021), 2) children’s basic mental state understanding (using items from The TOM Scale; Wellman & Liu, 2004, and the parent-report CSUS; Tahiroglu et al., 2014), and 3) nonverbal prosodic emotion recognition (using a subset of the CAM-C Voice trials; Golan et al., 2015).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".