Silent Struggles: Exploring Social Anxiety and Its Impact on Nigerian Adolescents

Brief Form of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI-B) for Adolescents

Your relationships with the people around you – friends, family, colleagues – have a strong influence on your overall life happiness. Even so, many people struggle to engage with the people around them. Social interactions can be stressful and many people choose to avoid them, even at a cost. Being able to measure these tendencies experimentally is a first useful step for assessing social avoidance without relying on people’s, often biased, recollections of their actions and behaviours. But how can a tendency to avoid social situations be quantified? And what can an experiment to measure this tendency reveal about the neural underpinnings of social avoidance? Schultz et al. asked volunteers to play a social game. If they played, the volunteers had the chance to win three euros, but they could choose not to play and receive a fixed amount of money, which varied across trials between zero and three euros. This approach allowed Schultz et al. to quantify how much the volunteers valued playing the game. The game involved playing with other virtual human partners, who gave either positive or negative social feedback depending on the outcome of the game in the form of videos of facial expressions. In a non-social control experiment, a computer gave abstract feedback in the form of symbols. Schultz et al. found that the value people placed on playing the social game varied with their level of social anxiety (established using a standard questionnaire). The more anxious people attributed less value to engaging in the game. Neuroimaging experiments revealed that the activity and connectivity between the amygdala and ventral striatum, two parts of the brain involved in processing emotions and reward-related stimuli, varied according to people’s levels of social anxiety. Social interactions have a major impact on the quality of life of both healthy people and those with mental disorders. Developing new ways to measure and understand the differences in the brain linked to social traits could help to characterise certain conditions and document therapy progress. Methods to quantify social anxiety and avoidance are also in line with efforts to explore the neuroscience behind the full range of human behaviour.

BackgroundNomophobia and social anxiety have significant negative implications for the physical and mental health of students, as well as their academic performance. Considering the variability in findings across studies on the prevalence of nomophobia and social anxiety, this study aimed to investigate the prevalence of nomophobia, its associated factors, and its relationship with social interaction anxiety among nursing students.MethodsThis cross-sectional descriptive-analytical study was conducted between August 22nd and September 23rd, 2023, at the School of Nursing and Midwifery in Kermanshah, located in western Iran. A convenience sampling method was employed, resulting in the recruitment of 258 participants. Data were collected using a three-part questionnaire, including a demographic information form, the Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q) to assess the severity of nomophobia, and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) to measure social anxiety levels. Data were analyzed using STATA, version 14. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize demographic and clinical characteristics. The Chi-square test, one-way analysis of variance, the Pearson correlation coefficient, and linear regression modeling were employed for inferential analysis.ResultsAll participating nursing students (n = 258) exhibited some degree of nomophobia. The prevalence of mild, moderate, and severe nomophobia was 40.7%, 40.3%, and 19%, respectively. Furthermore, 25.6% of the students experienced social anxiety. A significant positive correlation was found between nomophobia scores and social interaction anxiety (r =.37, P <.001). Social interaction anxiety emerged as the only significant independent predictor of nomophobia (P <.001), explaining 21% of the variance in nomophobia scores.ConclusionsThe results indicate both the prevalence of nomophobia and social anxiety, as well as the correlation between these two factors among students. Considering the numerous risks associated with nomophobia and social interaction anxiety, it is essential to optimize technology use and improve social interactions among students. Identifying students at risk of nomophobia and social interaction anxiety and providing psychological counseling services to them should be prioritized.

This study explored the impact of social anxiety on communication styles, academic and social performance, as well as strategies used to cope with this condition. The main findings show that social anxiety correlates with a tendency towards a passive communication style and the use of avoidance strategies. Individuals with social anxiety tend to avoid active participation in group discussions and opt for silence, which is influenced by feelings of inadequacy and fear of negative evaluation. Avoidance strategies, such as avoiding public communication situations, are used as coping mechanisms to reduce perceived anxiety. Social anxiety also had a significant impact on academic and social participation. Study participants reported decreased academic participation, such as fear of asking questions or participating in class discussions, which affected understanding of subject matter and academic performance. In addition, social anxiety often leads to social isolation, exacerbating loneliness and anxiety levels. Strategies used to cope with social anxiety include seeking social support from friends and family. This emotional support was shown to help individuals feel more comfortable and safe in social situations, reduce stress and These findings emphasize the importance of social support and interventions that promote social interaction to improve mental well-being and reduce the negative impact of social anxiety.

As there are more and more social situations that require people to interact with others, whatever men, women, young and old, their Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)e should be paid attention to. These social problems may come from different place. There are both internal and external factors. In this article, the author measured 4 methods, and these social barriers were studied. These are quantifying social anxiety and interpretation bias, using questionnaires, assessing social anxiety levels using the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS), and setting up novel scenarios to observe young children’s reactions when facing strangers or new toys. Research shows that in clinical and subclinical samples, social anxiety and interpretation bias do not differ significantly. The social isolation feeling from Z generation would through social anxiety to indirect impact the willing of people share their personal information. In different ages and countries, the proportion of people meeting the criteria for social anxiety disorder varies significantly. Plus, children may through observe their parents’ anxiety reaction to learn the anxiety emotion. This research found out some factors in families, like the educational methods, the relationship between brothers and sisters and the atmosphere in home. Additionally, some tendency to be anxious come from heritage. All of these factors influence how children and teenagers develop social anxiety. This research can help people find out those kids who have social anxiety, and find out some ways which can prevent and treat it more earlier, to decrease the bad effects in study and daily lives.

Both camouflaging and social anxiety are adolescence-emerging phenomenon, rooted in social situations, and associated with mental health. The directionality between camouflaging and social anxiety in autistic versus non-autistic adolescents is underexplored. This study aims to investigate the inter-relations between camouflaging, social anxiety, and depression, and the moderating role of autism diagnosis on these inter-relations. A total of 205 Taiwanese adolescents (100 autistic, 105 non-autistic) completed self-reported measures, including the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire, Chinese version (CAT-Q-Ch), Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, Chinese version (SIAS-C), Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item (GAD-7), and Patient Health Questionnaire 9-item (PHQ-9). Network analysis was used to examine the inter-relations among items of the CAT-Q-Ch and SIAS-C. Moderated mediation models, adjusted for generalized anxiety, examined the inter-relations among camouflaging, social anxiety, and depression, and how these associations varied by autism diagnosis. Autistic adolescents reported significantly higher scores on camouflaging, depression, generalized anxiety, and social anxiety than non-autistic adolescents. A network analysis showed that items from the CAT-Q-Ch formed two communities, and most SIAS-C items formed a third community, supporting the interpretation that camouflaging and social anxiety are related yet distinct constructs. For both autistic and non-autistic adolescents, social anxiety and camouflaging showed bidirectional indirect associations with depression. Critically, having an autism diagnosis significantly weakened the link between camouflaging and depression, as part of the indirect association between social anxiety and depression via camouflaging. The findings highlight the complex inter-relations among camouflaging, social anxiety, and depression, which may differ between autistic and non-autistic adolescents in Taiwan. Camouflaging may serve different functional roles and have different mental health implications for autistic and non-autistic adolescents. Future research should focus on teasing apart the complex conceptual, measurement, and causal mechanisms underlying the inter-relations between social anxiety and camouflaging in autistic versus non-autistic people.

Social anhedonia and social anxiety are two constructs with similar behaviors including avoidance of and withdrawal from social situations. In three studies, the current research aimed to test whether social anhedonia could be discriminated from social anxiety using the most common measure of social anhedonia, the Revised Social Anhedonia Scale (RSAS). In Study 1, an item-level factor analysis of the RSAS found two factors: Social Apathy/Aversion and Social Withdrawal. In Study 2, this two-factor structure was confirmed in a separate sample. In Study 3, a model with social anhedonia and anxiety scale scores loading on separate factors fit better than a model with social anhedonia and anxiety loading on a single factor. Social anhedonia and anxiety displayed differential associations with negative schizotypy and emotion processing. Findings suggest that the RSAS is successful in measuring social anhedonia distinct from social anxiety.

Background: Social anxiety is a fear of getting negative judgments from others when individuals are involved in certain social activities or situations. Social anxiety can also be experienced by teenagers who live in Social Child Welfare Institutions. Objective: This study aims to obtain an overview of the level of social anxiety in adolescents who live in Social Child Welfare Institutions in Pekanbaru City. Method: This quantitative study used a descriptive survey method, with a cluster random sampling technique of 240 adolescents as a sample. The research instrument is the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale questionnaire. Result: The results of this study indicate that 69.7% of the 240 adolescents living in Social Child Welfare Institutions experienced social anxiety. The dominating level is mild social anxiety (33.8%), followed by moderate social anxiety (21.3%), marked social anxiety (10%), severe social anxiety (3.8%), and very severe social anxiety (0.8%). The social situation that makes most respondents feel afraid or anxious is going to a party or event (74.2%), while the most avoidance response is urinating in a public toilet (55.2%). Conclusion: It can be concluded that adolescents living in Social Child Welfare Institutions experience social anxiety at various levels. Therefore, this research intends to make related institutions (Social Services) cooperate with Social Child Welfare Institutions to pay more attention to teenagers' development. Support can be in the form of providing facilities and health professionals who can help prevent social anxiety from escalating into a more severe condition or even causing other mental illnesses

Background The advent of the globalized economy has promoted the rapid development of cross-border educational exchanges, and the scale of the international student group has continued to expand. In an environment where there is a language barrier, daily communication becomes the main bottleneck for international students to integrate into the local society, which intensifies their social anxiety and sense of loneliness. For this reason, real-time speech recognition and translation technology have become potential intervention tools. To alleviate the social anxiety of international students, this study combines speech recognition real-time translation technology to intervene in the language barriers of international students in real social scenarios, and records and analyzes the changes in their anxiety levels. Methods The study selected 46 international students from different countries as subjects, whose ages ranged from 18 to 30. The study divided it into two groups, Group A and Group B, and implemented different intervention measures for the students in the two groups. Group A students participated in an eight-week daily conversation training using real-time translation devices based on speech recognition, while Group B received traditional language courses without using any translation AIDS. During the experiment, the social situations and anxiety levels of the two groups of students were recorded every week. The frequency of social interaction, the duration of conversations and the number of communication partners are used as assessment indicators of social ability. Teachers conduct blind evaluations of their social performance, with scores ranging from 1 to 5. The higher the score, the better the social performance. Anxiety levels are evaluated using the Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAMA). Results The changes in social performance and anxiety levels of the two groups of students during the experiment are shown in Fig. 1. As can be seen from Fig. 1 (a), the social performance scores of students in group A steadily increased over time. The average score in the eighth week reached 4.3 points, which was significantly higher than that of students in group B at the same period, which was 2.8 points. The difference was statistically significant (p&amp;lt;.05). Fig. 1 (b) shows that the HAMA score of group A decreased from 21.2 points at baseline to 12.6 points at week 8, while that of group B only dropped from 20.9 points to 17.3 points. The anxiety level in group A was relieved more significantly, and the difference between the groups was statistically significant (p&amp;lt;.05). Discussion The research results show that the real-time translation technology of speech recognition can effectively alleviate the anxiety of international students in cross-language social interaction and significantly enhance their social participation ability. Current research only focuses on short-term intervention effects and has not yet examined the possible long-term impacts of technological dependence. Future research can extend the intervention period and include subjects from more cultural backgrounds to verify the universality of this technology in different language environments.

Social anxiety (SA) significantly impacts university students, while mobile gaming addiction represents a growing concern with potential psychological consequences. Despite theoretical links, the specific influence of mobile gaming addiction on SA among Nigerian undergraduates requires empirical investigation. This research aimed to investigate the influence of mobile gaming addiction on social anxiety (SA) among undergraduates at Redeemer’s University Ede, Osun state. This cross-sectional survey utilized a multistage sampling technique to select 300 participants (149 male, 151 female) with a mean age of 19.53 ±2.22. Participants completed the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short-Form (IGDS9-SF) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (prevalence calculation), linear regression, ANOVA, and t-tests. A prevalence of 5.9% and 1.7% was reported for social anxiety and mobile gaming addiction respectively. Mobile gaming addiction significantly predicted social anxiety (β = .27, t = 4.40, p &lt;.01). Age also significantly predicted social anxiety (β = -.98, t = -2.31, p &lt;.01), with younger students showing higher levels of anxiety. Years spent in university did not significantly influence social anxiety levels [F (4,295) = .26, p&gt;0.05]. No significant gender difference was found in social anxiety scores [t (298) = -2.35, p&gt; .05], although female students (M = 36.86, SD = 15.85) scored slightly higher than male students (M = 32.39, SD = 16.65). These findings revealed a high prevalence of social anxiety among Nigerian undergraduates and underscore the strong role mobile gaming addiction and age play in SA. The study suggests a need for targeted interventions to address gaming-related issues and SA, particularly among younger students. Future research should explore additional factors contributing to SA in university settings and develop effective strategies for supporting student mental health.

Although decades of research have examined relationships between social anxiety and negative outcomes, this study examined relations with indices of positive psychological functioning. In college students (nD 204), a factor analysis on self-report measures of positive psychological functioning derived 3 conceptually meaningful broad domains: Positive Subjective Experiences, Curiosity, and Appetitive Motivations. Analyses were conducted to test whether social interaction anxiety demonstrated unique relationships with positive psychological domains after controlling for shared variance with social observation anxiety (e.g., eating in public, public speaking) and neuroticism. Social interaction anxiety explained unique variance in all 3 domains after separately controlling for social observation anxiety and neuroticism. In contrast, social observation anxiety demonstrated near-zero relationships with all 3 domains, and neuroticism predicted Positive Subjective Experiences, and to a lesser degree, Curiosity. These data provide evidence for the unique association between social interaction anxiety and positive psychological functioning, with implications for future basic and applied research.

This study was conducted to better understand the relationship between social anxiety and fear of intimacy among young adults. Socially anxious individuals characteristically report fear of evaluation and scrutiny by others, we hypothesized that there is no impact of social anxiety on fear of intimacy among young adults, including the difference in social anxiety and fear of intimacy among males and females. Self-report data were collected from 81 males and 119 females aged 18- 25 years of age residing in the city of Bangalore, India. The tools used in the study were Social interaction anxiety scale (SIAS) was designed by Mattick and Clarke and The Fear of Intimacy Scale designed by Michelle, Mark &amp; Thelen. The study found a positive correlation between social anxiety and fear of intimacy in young adults, rejecting the hypothesis that there is no relationship between the two variables. The independent t-test showed no significant difference in social anxiety or fear of intimacy between males and females. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that social anxiety affects fear of intimacy, as an increase in anxiety leads to an increase in social anxiety. Therefore, the hypothesis that social anxiety impacts fear of intimacy was rejected. The findings suggest that social anxiety may be a significant factor in determining social anxiety levels. The study provides insights into the challenges young adults with social anxiety face in forming close relationships, suggesting that identifying social anxiety could predict and address intimacy fear, potentially leading to more comprehensive treatment plans.

Loneliness is a public health concern with detrimental effects on physical and mental well-being. Given phenotypical overlaps between loneliness and social anxiety (SA), cognitive-behavioral interventions targeting SA might be adopted to reduce loneliness. However, whether SA and loneliness share the same underlying neurocognitive mechanisms is still an elusive question. The current study aimed at investigating to what extent known behavioral and neural correlates of social avoidance in SA are evident in loneliness. We used a prestratified approach involving 42 (21 females) participants with high loneliness (HL) and 40 (20 females) participants with low loneliness (LL) scores. During fMRI, participants completed a social gambling task to measure the subjective value of engaging in social situations and responses to social feedback. Univariate and multivariate analyses of behavioral and neural data replicated known task effects. However, although HL participants showed increased SA, loneliness was associated with a response pattern clearly distinct from SA. Specifically, contrary to expectations based on SA differences, Bayesian analyses revealed moderate evidence for equal subjective values of engaging in social situations and comparable amygdala responses to social decision-making and striatal responses to positive social feedback in both groups. Moreover, while explorative analyses revealed reduced pleasantness ratings, increased striatal activity, and decreased striatal-hippocampal connectivity in response to negative computer feedback in HL participants, these effects were diminished for negative social feedback. Our findings suggest that, unlike SA, loneliness is not associated with withdrawal from social interactions. Thus, established interventions for SA should be adjusted when targeting loneliness.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Loneliness can cause serious health problems. Adapting well-established cognitive-behavioral therapies targeting social anxiety might be promising to reduce chronic loneliness given a close link between both constructs. However, a better understanding of behavioral and neurobiological factors associated with loneliness is needed to identify which specific mechanisms of social anxiety are shared by lonely individuals. We found that lonely individuals show a consistently distinct pattern of behavioral and neural responsiveness to social decision-making and social feedback compared with previous findings for social anxiety. Our results indicate that loneliness is associated with a biased emotional reactivity to negative events rather than social avoidance. Our findings thus emphasize the distinctiveness of loneliness from social anxiety and the need for adjusted psychotherapeutic protocols.

Loneliness is a public health concern with detrimental effects on physical and mental well-being. Given phenotypical overlaps between loneliness and social anxiety (SA), cognitive-behavioral interventions targeting SA might be adopted...

Social anxiety in the general population: Introducing abbreviated versions of SIAS and SPS