Social Anxiety and Its Maintaining Factors: Accounting for the Role of Neuroticism

Abstract

Models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and research indicate several cognitive and behavioural maintaining factors that perpetuate social anxiety (i.e., maladaptive social-evaluative beliefs, self-focus, attention towards threat in environment, anticipatory processing, post-event processing, safety behaviours). It is unknown whether these maintaining factors are exclusive to social anxiety or if they are also related to neuroticism – a tendency to experience negative emotions. A community sample of adults (N = 263) completed measures of relevant constructs (social anxiety, neuroticism, depression, aforementioned maintaining factors). Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the cross-sectional data. In a good fitting model which included depression, social anxiety had unique positive associations with all maintaining factors. Neuroticism had unique positive associations with social-evaluative beliefs, self-focus, and post-event processing, but not with any of the other maintaining factors. This model also had superior fit compared to a plausible competing model which did not include neuroticism. Certain maintaining factors may not be exclusive to social anxiety, in contrast to how they are conceptualised in models of SAD. Furthermore, neuroticism may play a role in social anxiety, highlighting the potential of interventions for social anxiety to be advanced through greater incorporation of emotion regulation strategies for negative affect.