The burden of being seen

Social anxiety is among the most common anxiety disorders in adolescence, a period characterized by heightened social evaluation concerns and increased emotional reactivity. Alongside fear of negative evaluation (FNE), fear of positive evaluation (FPE), defined as feelings of apprehension and discomfort in response to praise or positive feedback, has emerged as a distinct construct. Although fears of evaluation have been theorized to act as regulatory forces shaping socially anxious individuals’ affect and behavior, their associations with emotion regulation processes remain largely unexplored, particularly in adolescence. Therefore, this cumulative dissertation aimed to examine the roles of FPE and FNE in the relationship between adolescents’ social anxiety and emotion regulation, and their contribution to social anxiety’s impaired affect through emotion regulatory mechanisms, with a particular focus on acceptance, suppression, and rumination. Across four scientific papers resulting from two empirical studies, this dissertation combined cross-sectional, longitudinal, and Ecological Momentary Assessment methods to capture these associations in adolescence. Chapter 1 employed structural equation modeling (N = 647 adolescents; 14–17 years) and showed that FPE and FNE mediated distinct pathways: FPE linked social anxiety to lower acceptance and greater suppression via a serial mediation, while FNE mediated the association with rumination. Chapter 2 extended these findings longitudinally using Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models (N = 684 adolescents; 14–18 years; three waves over a total of six months), revealing prospective effects from acceptance to FPE, as well as prospective effects from suppression to social anxiety and from social anxiety to rumination. Chapter 3 analyzed adolescents’ daily experiences (N = 47 adolescents; 14–18 years; k = 1,998 observations) using multilevel structural equation modeling and showing that social anxiety was associated with lower acceptance, higher suppression, and more rumination, which predicted lower positive and higher negative affect. Finally, Chapter 4, using the same statistical approach as in Chapter 3 (N = 80 adolescents; 14–18 years; k = 3,423 observations), found that FPE was linked to greater negative affect following positive feedback, lower acceptance, higher suppression, and increased rumination, with suppression and rumination mediating its effects on daily affect. Together, these findings highlight fears of evaluation, particularly FPE, as central mechanisms linking social anxiety to emotion regulation difficulties and altered affective functioning in adolescence.