Category: Anxiety

Social anxiety is more than being shy — the fear can be so great that the social situation can only be born with considerable distress.

People who are neurotic and introverted tend to experience more social anxiety, research concludes.

Social anxiety involves worrying about being embarrassed or humiliated in front of others.

It is more than being shy — the fear can be so great that the social situation can only be born with considerable distress.

It sometimes makes people cancel social plans out of fear.

Neuroticism is a personality trait that is strongly linked to anxiety, sadness, irritability and self-consciousness.

Neurotic people experience more social anxiety because social situations can be stressful anyway and the neurotic mind tends to focus on the negative.

Introverts also suffer in some social situations as they can get overwhelmed by too much stimulation.

The conclusions come from a study of 135 people who were asked about their personalities and any symptoms of social anxiety disorder.

Mr Patryk Łakuta, the study’s author, explained the results:

“Extraversion and Neuroticism were found to act as key determinants of social anxiety symptoms measured at one-month follow-up.”

Some combinations of other personality traits are also linked to social anxiety.

People who are introverts and very open to new experience tend to have the highest levels of social anxiety.

Conversely other personality combinations provided protection against social anxiety, explained Mr Łakuta:

“High Extraversion at high Openness was strongly predictive of lower levels of social anxiety symptoms, and interaction of these traits seems to provide incrementally greater protection against SA (social anxiety).

The interaction illustrates personality synergies in protection against social anxiety so that high Openness seems to amplify beneficial effects of positive emotionality of high Extraversion.

Conversely, individuals low in Extraversion appeared at higher risk of social anxiety symptoms.

However, the most severe symptoms were associated with low Extraversion combined with high Openness.”

The study was published in The Journal of Psychology (Łakuta et al., 2019).

Anxiety has an unexpected effect on memory.

People with manageable levels of anxiety did better in a memory test, recalling more details, research finds.

Anxious people’s memories are particularly good when they are in a negative mindset, even if the things they are trying to remember are neutral.

This is ironic since anxious people often feel their memory is worse than others and spend longer self-questioning.

Anxiety also serves to taint memories, however, the researchers found.

Events that might seem neutral to most people can seem negative to those feeling anxious.

Professor Myra Fernandes, study co-author, said:

“People with high anxiety have to be careful.

To some degree, there is an optimal level of anxiety that is going to benefit your memory, but we know from other research that high levels of anxiety can cause people to reach a tipping point, which impacts their memories and performance.”

The study of 80 students involved them looking at a series of pictures and later trying to recall the details.

Some pictures elicited negative emotions (a car wreck), while others were neutral (of a ship).

What anxious people remembered, the results showed, was highly dependent on whether the image was negative or not.

Negative images boosted anxious people’s recall of the image.

Mr Christopher Lee, the study’s first author, said:

“By thinking about emotional events or by thinking about negative events this might put you in a negative mindset that can bias you or change the way you perceive your current environment.

So, I think for the general public it is important to be aware of what biases you might bring to the table or what particular mindset you might be viewing the world in and how that might ultimately shape what we walk away seeing.”

The study was published in the journal Brain Sciences (Lee & Fernandes, 2017).

Psychologists have been using variations on this technique, but this is the first study to show it works.

“However you tag your thoughts — as trash or as worthy of protection — seems to make a difference in how you use those thoughts.At some level, it can sound silly.But we found that it really works — by physically throwing away or protecting your thoughts, you influence how you end up using those thoughts.Merely imagining engaging in these actions has no effect.”

“We talk about our thoughts as if we can visualize them.We hold our thoughts.We take stances on issues, we lean this way or that way.This all makes our thoughts more real to us.”

“When they threw their thoughts away, they didn’t consider them anymore, whether they were positive or negative.

“This suggests you can magnify your thoughts, and make them more important to you, by keeping them with you in your wallet or purse.”

“The more convinced the person is that the thoughts are really gone, the better.Just imagining that you throw them away doesn’t seem to work.Of course, even if you throw the thoughts in a garbage can or put them in the recycle bin on the computer, they are not really gone — you can regenerate them.But the representations of those thoughts are gone, at least temporarily, and it seems to make it easier to not think about them.”