Social skills deficits and self-appraisal biases in children with social anxiety disorder

Testing theoretical processes that maintain paediatric social anxiety: A comparison between children and adolescents with social anxiety disorder, other mental disorders, and non-clinical controls

BACKGROUND

Paediatric social anxiety disorder (SoAD) responds poorly to treatment. Improved understanding of potential psychological maintaining processes may indicate fruitful directions to improve treatment outcomes. The current study compared self-reported psychological processes and state anxiety in response to two social tasks experienced by children and adolescents with SoAD against comparison samples.

METHODS

641 children and adolescents aged 6-17 years (Mage = 9.45 yr; 47.6% girls) engaged in a brief, impromptu speech and a social discussion with a confederate. Participants included 307 with SoAD, 285 with other mental disorders, and 49 non-clinical controls. Participants who completed each task self-reported their anticipated probability and cost of negative evaluation, self-focused attention, personal evaluation of social performance, and engagement in post-event rumination (assessed 1 h later). Independent raters also scored their social performance. Relationships between the variables were tested through path analysis.

RESULTS

Participants with SoAD were more likely to avoid and reported significantly greater state anxiety than both comparison groups. They also reported higher levels of each of the putative maintaining processes than either comparison group. In contrast, independent observers did not discriminate between groups on their overt social performance. Path analyses demonstrated good fit of a priori models to the data for both social tasks.

CONCLUSIONS

Paediatric SoAD is associated with strong expectation of the probability and cost of negative evaluation, excess self-focused attention, and more negative evaluation of one's own social performance. In turn, these putative processes are strong predictors of state anxiety and post-event processing in response to both a speech and social interaction.

Adverse Childhood Experience, Parental Bonding, and Fatherhood as Parenting Vulnerabilities to Social Anxiety Severity

Background: The present study aims to elucidate the association between adverse childhood experiences, parental bonding, fatherhood, and social anxiety symptoms among emerging adults within an Iranian context. Methods: This prospective cross-sectional study utilized self-reported assessments to evaluate fatherhood, parental bonding, anxious thoughts, and childhood trauma. The study was administered to 242 university students exhibiting social anxiety symptoms. Among the participants, 181 (74.8%) were boys and 61 (25.2%) were girls between the ages of 18 and 29. In terms of educational background, 64.9% of them held a bachelor's degree, and 35.1% held a master's degree. A majority of them (84.3%) were of middle-class socio-economic status, 6.6% were of low income, and 9.1% were of high income. Results: Analysis via multiple linear regression revealed that individuals with adverse childhood experiences exhibited heightened levels of social anxiety symptoms (R2 = 0.32) compared to their counterparts without such experiences. Furthermore, fatherhood (R2 = 0.28), paternal bonding (R2 = 0.26), and maternal bonding (R2 = 0.26) were all significantly and equally associated with variance in social anxiety symptoms. The findings underscored the substantial correlation between ACEs, fatherhood, and both maternal and paternal bonding with social anxiety symptoms in adulthood. Conclusions: Accordingly, the study emphasizes the importance of thoroughly assessing the multifaceted contributors to social anxiety. Such insights are pivotal for the design and implementation of community-based preventive interventions aimed at reducing the societal burden of social anxiety disorders.

Lowered social motivation is associated with adolescent attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and social anxiety symptoms

BACKGROUND

Difficulties in social skills are highly prevalent in children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), however, the reasons for these social difficulties are poorly understood. This study aimed to understand social motivation in children (aged 5-8) and adolescents (aged 13-17) with and without ADHD, and the relationship between social anxiety and social motivation in youth with ADHD.

METHOD

204 parents of children and adolescents with and without ADHD completed online questionnaires on social motivation, social anxiety, and ADHD symptoms.

RESULTS

Adolescents with ADHD had significantly lower social motivation than typically developing adolescents, and children with ADHD. Higher social anxiety significantly predicted lowered social motivation in participants with ADHD.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings indicate a unique pattern of social motivation in ADHD, specifically a reduction during adolescence, reflecting social intervention inefficacy. Additionally, these findings establish a link between social motivation and social anxiety, suggesting that they may act as barriers to social intervention.

Adaptation and validation of two annotation scales for assessing social skills in a corpus of multimodal collaborative interactions

Context

Behavioral observation scales are important for understanding and assessing social skills. In the context of collaborative problem-solving (CPS) skills, considered essential in the 21st century, there are no validated scales in French that can be adapted to different CPS tasks. The aim of this study is to adapt and validate, by annotating a new video corpus of dyadic interactions that we have collected, two observational scales allowing us to qualitatively assess CPS skills: the Social Performance Rating Scale (SPRS) and the Social Skills of Collaboration Scale (SSC).

Method

The construct validity of these two scales was assessed by exploratory factor analysis and inter-item correlations. We also checked inter-judge agreement using inter-class correlation coefficients. Internal consistency was determined using Cronbach's alpha and convergent and divergent validity by assessing correlations between the two scales and measures of depression and alexithymia. Finally, the discriminative properties of the two scales were analyzed by comparing the scores obtained by a group of anxious individuals and a non-anxious control group.

Results

The results show that our two scales have excellent inter-item correlations. Internal consistency is excellent (alpha SPRS =0.90; SSC = 0.93). Inter-rater agreement ranged from moderate to high. Finally, convergent validity was significant with the alexithymia scale, as was divergent validity with the depression scale. Anxious individuals had lower scores on both scales than non-anxious individuals.

Conclusion

Both scales show good psychometric properties for assessing social skills relevant to different collaborative tasks. They also identify individuals with difficulties in social interaction. Thus, they could allow monitoring the effectiveness of training social skills useful in CPS.

Prevalence of social anxiety disorder and symptoms among Chinese children, adolescents and young adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis

The objective of the study is to provide a reliable estimate of the pooled prevalence of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and social anxiety symptoms (SAS) among children, adolescents, and young adults (CAYA) in China. Meta-analysis is used to provide pooled-prevalence rate of SAD and SAS. Literature searches were conducted in both English and Chinese databases from the database's inception to April 2019. Eleven studies were identified for SAD, and 17 were included for SAS. The results revealed a pooled prevalence of SAD of 2.1% (95% CI: 1.2-3.8%) with high between-studies heterogeneity (Q = 1,055.2, I 2 = 99.1%, p < 0.001). The pooled prevalence estimate of SAS was 23.5% (95% CI: 18.6-29.3%), also with significant heterogeneity (Q = 1,019.3, I 2 = 98.4%, p < 0.001). Different diagnostic tools or self-report scales reported significant different prevalence of SAD or SAS. Further analysis stratified by gender, age, sampling methods, economic status, and risk of bias were performed. Limitations include the high level of heterogeneity between studies, inadequate number of the studies, and significant differences in prevalence caused by measurements.

Systematic review registration

https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42020149591, identifier: PROSPERO CRD42020149591.

Are fearful boys at higher risk for anxiety? Person-centered profiles of toddler fearful behavior predict anxious behaviors at age 6

Dysregulated fear (DF), the presence of fearful behaviors in both low-threat and high-threat contexts, is associated with child anxiety symptoms during early childhood (e.g., Buss et al., 2013). However, not all children with DF go on to develop an anxiety disorder (Buss and McDoniel, 2016). This study leveraged the data from two longitudinal cohorts (N = 261) to (1) use person-centered methods to identify profiles of fearful temperament, (2) replicate the findings linking DF to anxiety behaviors in kindergarten, (3) test if child sex moderates associations between DF and anxiety behaviors, and (4) examine the consistency of findings across multiple informants of child anxiety behaviors. We identified a normative fear profile (low fear in low-threat contexts; high fear in high-threat contexts), a low fear profile (low fear across both low- and high-threat contexts) and a DF profile (high fear across both low- and high-threat contexts). Results showed that probability of DF profile membership was significantly associated with child self-reported overanxiousness, but not with parent-reported overanxiousness. Associations between DF profile membership and overanxiousness was moderated by child sex such that these associations were significant for boys only. Additionally, results showed that probability of DF profile membership was associated with both parent-reported social withdrawal and observations of social reticence, but there were no significant associations with child self-report of social withdrawal. Results highlight the importance of considering person-centered profiles of fearful temperament across different emotion-eliciting contexts, and the importance of using multiple informants to understand associations with temperamental risk for child anxiety.