Social threat reveals self-esteem mismatch in social anxiety disorder adolescents

Sep 19 2012

By Liam Davenport, medwireNews Reporter

Adolescents with social anxiety disorder have a marked discrepancy between implicit and explicit self-esteem following a social threat, such as being asked to give a speech, the results of a German study indicate.

The team, led by Franziska Schreiber, from Goethe-University, in Frankfurt-am-Main, says: "The discrepancy in self-esteem among adolescents with social anxiety disorder may be maintained by an automatic implicit self-defence emotion regulation mechanism, in response to threat.

"Given that social anxiety disorder and perfectionism are highly interrelated, and that socially anxious individuals have overly high personal standards, one might speculate that the persistent failure to live up to their self-relevant goals (eg, implicit self-esteem) could induce low levels of explicit self-esteem."

Studying 20 adolescents aged 14-20 years with social anxiety disorder and 20 age- and gender-matched healthy controls, the team administered measures of implicit self-esteem - the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) - before and after the social threat of having 3 minutes to prepare for giving a videotaped short speech about themselves.

In addition, the participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory and the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory, as well as the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and the Social Cognitions Questionnaire.

Adolescents with social anxiety disorder had significantly lower explicit self-esteem, higher frequencies for social phobic cognitions, and a stronger belief in such cognition than healthy controls, and were significantly more depressed.

The team also reports in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry that, before and after the social threat activation, patients and controls had high positive implicit self-esteem on both measures. There was a significant positive interrelation between AMP and IAT scores after, but not before, the social threat activation, at r scores of -0.36 and -0.09, respectively.

There was no significant association between measures of explicit and implicit self-esteem tests among healthy adolescents. However, for adolescents with social anxiety disorder, AMP scores were significantly inversely related with the frequency of negative social cognitions, the strength of belief with respect to these cognitions, and social anxiety symptoms.

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