Psychological And Neural Mechanism Of Others-oriented Social Anxiety

Others-oriented social anxiety(SA-DOS)refers to worrying that if one’s anxiety is discovered,it will make others feel anxious,uncomfortable or annoyed,which will lead to some adverse consequences(Rector et al.,2006a).Corresponding to this is self-directed social anxiety,the core feature of which is fear of being watched and negatively evaluated by others,and therefore feel embarrassed or ashamed.Existing studies have found that the fear of causing discomfort or offense to others is the core of the cultural script of social anxiety in East Asia(Essau et al.,2012;Zhu et al.,2014),this fear directed by others is an integral part of Chinese social anxiety.However,the researches on SA-DOS mostly stay at the level of symptoms and related theories,and there are few empirical studies focusing on its psychological and neural mechanisms.In this study,a pair of 404 Chinese college students were surveyed by online questionnaire,and collected the data of Tripartite Model of Self-construal Scale,Self-consciousness Scale,Brief Negative Evaluation Fear Scale,Social Anxiety-the Fear of Causing Discomfort to Others Scale and Social Interaction Anxiety Scale.The study found that:(1)The fear of negative evaluation plays a partial mediating role between public self-consciousness and others-oriented social anxiety;(2)The fear of negative evaluation plays a completely mediating role between public self-consciousness and self-oriented social anxiety;(3)Relational self plays a moderating role between public self-consciousness and others-oriented social anxiety.It positively moderates the relationship between public self-consciousness and others-oriented social anxiety;(4)Individual self has a moderating role between public self-consciousness and self-oriented social anxiety.Individual self moderates the direct path and the second half of mediation path.In the second study,based on the results of the first study,using the oddball paradigm of triple self-constructed event-related potentials,the differences in neural processing mechanism of college students who scored 27% higher or lower on the social anxiety scale of others’ pointing were compared.Repeated measurement variance analysis shows that:(1)higher others-oriented social anxiety,compared with lower others-oriented social anxiety,has lower N2 amplitude in stimulating relational self;(2)Compared with individuals with low others-oriented anxiety,individuals with high others’ social anxiety caused greater P3 amplitude to the relational self-construction stimulation than irrelevant self-construction stimulation.This study is one of the few empirical studies to explore others-oriented social anxiety.It verifies that Others-oriented social anxiety is related to high-relational self from psychological and neural mechanisms,which may be the characteristic of Others-oriented social anxiety,which is helpful to further understand the characteristics of Chinese people’s social anxiety symptoms,and then to diagnose and treat patients more appropriately.