Background: Social anxiety (SA) is an intense fear of social settings that negatively impacts many aspects of an individual's life, including relationships, employment, and mental health. Research suggests an important link between SA and social cognitive processing (i.e., the ability to reason about others). Unfortunately, research in this area has been exceedingly mixed; arguably because of the different aspects of social cognition and social anxiety measured across studies. To gain clarity into the specific nature of the relationships between SA and social cognition, the current study employed multiple measures of both.
Method: A sample of 78 children (Mage = 8.15, SD = 1.61) and their parents participated online through Zoom and Qualtrics. We conducted 4 hierarchical regressions, examining whether higher levels of SA, assessed through social worry and fear of negative evaluation (FNE), would predict poorer performance in 4 different measures of social cognition, and whether levels of social avoidance would provide additional predictive value.
Results and Discussion: Contrary to our expectations, our overall regression model combining measures of social anxiety (both worry and FNE) and social avoidance did not significantly predict performance on any of our social cognitive variables (p > .05). Interestingly, however, FNE was a unique predictor of poor basic mental state understanding (t(69) = -2.28, p = .03, (Holm-Bonferonni corrected p = .057) suggesting that children who present poor mental state understanding would benefit from interventions designed to reduce the fear of negative evaluation. Furthermore, we found surprisingly weak correlations among our measures of social cognition (r ≦ .30), suggesting social cognition is a multifaceted construct and future research should avoid relying on any single measure to capture children's social cognitive ability. Implications for future intervention approaches and practical applications will be discussed, including how it applies to children impacted by the pandemic.
