Общение в интернете и социальная тревожность у подростков из разных социальных групп

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study of social anxiety and social anhedonia symptoms in adolescents from different social groups, depending on channels of communication with other people they prefer — face-to-face contact, social networking, smartphones, Skype and various sites on the Internet. The study involved 110 people from two Moscow colleges and orphanage. In this study we have used complex of four methods, one of which — “Questionnaire of the channels of social communication” — used for the first time. Based on these results it is concluded that the most common ways of communication in mod-ern adolescents — face-to-face contact and social networks, which are used by them about equally often, however, the majority of adolescents prefer face-to¬face contact to all other channels of communication. Adolescents who prefer face-to-face contact to all other ways of communications, are more prosperous in terms of the two questionnaires of social anxiety (scale of social avoidance and distress — SADS; Watson, Friend, 1969; brief scale of fear of social evaluation — BENE; Leary, 1983) and the scale of the social anhedonia (RSAS; Eckblad et al, 1982) and ones who prefer to communicate in social networks have higher rates in all three questionnaires. It is suggested that the relationship between social anxiety and the frequency of use of social networking is not direct, but mediated by avoiding face-to-face contact. The mechanism of anxiety response leads to amplification of avoidance of face-to-face contact in everyday social situations and further strengthen of social anxiety. This article was prepared with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation (grant No. 14–18–03461).