Abstract
Despite preliminary evidence that individuals with higher social anxiety tend to avoid eye contact during at least some social encounters, the function of this behavior remains unknown. Cognitive theories of social anxiety suggest that gaze avoidance may function as an attempt to avoid signs of social threat. However, it is unclear whether this behavior is effective for reducing anxiety and, if it is effective, whether this benefit is only present in the short-term. The goal of the current study was to test whether gaze avoidance is effective in reducing anxiety for individuals with higher social anxiety during short social conversations among peers. Participants completed a short social interaction with another undergraduate participant in which eye contact was manipulated halfway through the interaction. Recordings of the interactions were later coded for amount of eye contact; this allowed us to obtain an objective measure of adherence to the manipulation instructions. Participants were instructed to make either more or less eye contact, or continue as before. Being asked to make less eye contact was the most anxiety-provoking condition for participants with higher social anxiety. We propose, in line with previous research on safety behaviors, that avoiding eye contact in an effort to regulate state anxiety is an ineffective strategy over time for individuals with higher social anxiety. Therefore gaze avoidance may be a particularly important safety behavior to target in treatment for social anxiety disorder.
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Notes
Due to expected cell frequencies less than 5, we were unable to include the following ethnicities: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Black, Hispanic, Multiracial, and Not Listed. Thus, we were only able to test whether the frequencies of Asian and White participants varied by condition.
To rule out the possibility that these interaction effects were due to a difference between the conditions other than our manipulation, we tested whether these effects were present prior to the manipulation instructions. The SIAS was the only significant predictor of state anxiety after the first interaction (part r = .52, p < .001), but no significant main or interactive effects for the condition variables were found (ps > .30). Conditions were therefore equivalent regarding state anxiety prior to randomization to instructions regarding eye contact.
The overall pattern of the results was similar when we used state anxiety at the mid-point of the conversation as the predicted variable.
This analysis does not include ratings of how much participants liked the experimenter (when the experimenter was a conversation partner) because this analysis concerns how much partners liked the primary participant and experimenters were never primary participants. Some ratings were made by experimenters, but this practice is consistent with previous studies (e.g., Alden and Bieling 1998).
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Rina Matsumoto, Lucas Delort, Bethany McCord, Reuben Karchem, Elizabeth Riley, and Ali Hong for their work in collecting and coding data for this project.
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Langer, J.K., Rodebaugh, T.L. Social Anxiety and Gaze Avoidance: Averting Gaze but not Anxiety. Cogn Ther Res 37, 1110–1120 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-013-9546-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-013-9546-z