The Anxious Mind: Examining the Conflicting Relationships Between Distinct Aspects of Social Anxiety and Social Cognition

Social anxiety (SA) negatively impacts myriad aspects of an individual’s life. Although research with adults and children highlights an important link between SA and social cognitive abilities (e.g., reasoning about others’ thoughts and emotions), findings are mixed. We hypothesized that these mixed findings stem from the various combinations of social cognitive components of SA under investigation and the different types of measures used. Understanding these relationships in middle-to-late childhood is especially important, given that it is a period of substantial social cognitive development and a common onset age for SA. Seventy-eight children (Mage = 8.15 years, SD = 1.61) and their parents completed measures capturing different components of anxiety (i.e., social worry, fear of negative evaluation, and social avoidance) and social cognition (i.e., emotion recognition, mental state understanding, and social perspective-taking). Measures of social cognition were not significantly correlated. Consistent with our expectations, associations between social cognition and social anxiety were measure-dependent. Self-reported fear of negative evaluation emerged as a positive predictor of accuracy in a behavioral measure of mental state understanding but a negative predictor of parent-reported mental state understanding. In addition, social avoidance accounted for additional variance only when predicting lower self-reported perspective-taking. Together, our findings highlight the multifaceted nature of social cognition and SA and the need for distinguishing these facets in future work. These findings are discussed in the context of measurement limitations in the current study and the related measurement challenges faced in this field.