Negative Emotion Differentiation Buffers against Intergenerational Risk for Social Anxiety in At-Risk Adolescent Girls

Abstract

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) tends to emerge during adolescence and is more prevalent among those assigned female at birth. Parental social anxiety confers risk for adolescent SAD but less is known regarding protective factors. Research suggests that emotion differentiation (the ability to discriminate between similarly valenced emotions, e.g., fear vs. sadness vs. anger) may be protective, as it is associated with adaptive psychosocial outcomes. However, little work has examined how emotion differentiation influences the development of SAD, particularly during periods of higher risk such as adolescence. In a longitudinal study of adolescent girls at high temperamental risk for SAD (aged 11-14-years; n=114), we tested whether emotion differentiation (derived using negative and positive emotion ratings from 16-day ecological momentary assessments at baseline) moderated the relationship between parental and adolescent social anxiety symptoms across two years. Results revealed significant moderation by negative (but not positive) emotion differentiation (p=.042): Baseline parental social anxiety was positively associated with adolescent social anxiety symptoms at two-year follow-up but only at lower (vs. higher) levels of emotion differentiation, even after controlling for baseline depressive symptoms. Exploratory analyses showed that these effects were unique to avoidance of social situations (p=.014). Findings highlight the protective effects of emotion differentiation and have important clinical implications for understanding and treating SAD.