Not always, of course. But this study suggests that socially anxious people are better at picking up on others’ subliminal expressions of fear.
Speaking personally, I like a conceptualization of social anxiety that sees the anxious as highly accurate, much more so than a conceptualization that sees the anxious as reading things into situations that aren’t there. I’m much more amenable to having it explained why my perceptions are both accurate and giving me problems (and then helping me figure out what to do with the accurate input I am receiving), than I am to being told I’m imagining it all (and should therefore simply ignore any environmental input I get that the person who’s telling me this thinks doesn’t exist – but how to tell that without farming out my good judgment?).
Anonymous says:
Do bear in mind that when you take this stance, you’re treating people without social anxiety problems in the same invalidating way you object to being treated. “You’re just upset because you’re imagining things” isn’t really a lot more upsetting than “you’re living in a fantasy world because it helps you ignore real problems.”
There’s a different asymmetry that does lend the idea some credibility — people would find it rewarding to be able to ignore real problems, whereas they presumably don’t get much out of making up nonexistent ones. So from that perspective, Occam’s Razor would favor siding with the anxious people: they’re being accurate, the non-anxious people are being self-serving, and we don’t need to invent any new constructs or theories. We do, however, have a new problem. When the people in the small minority were the ones who were mistaken, their behavior wasn’t particularly critical in explaining how social groups can function. When it’s the people in the majority who don’t know what’s going on, we need to figure out how things can still function. Of course, that’s far from impossible.
Regarding the article, it makes me wonder whether the phenomenon scales up to real interactions. If anxious people become more anxious when given subtle fear cues, then you’d expect a gathering of anxious people to become increasingly anxious, and an anxious person among confident people to be more calm. Of course, a visible facial expression gives you very different information from a subliminal one. Certainly it makes people better at attaching the emotion to the other person instead of to themselves, and so the effect might not replicate. It probably depends on whether priming affected participants’ interpretation of the faces because they combined the primed face with the visible face (e.g., forming an inference about a person who showed fear and then surprise) or whether the subliminal faces affected them directly (i.e., the subliminal fear face makes them fearful, and feeling fear makes them more likely to interpret an ambiguous face negatively.
August 11, 2007, 8:36 pmAnonymous says:
Do bear in mind that when you take this stance, you’re treating people without social anxiety problems in the same invalidating way you object to being treated. “You’re just upset because you’re imagining things” isn’t really a lot more upsetting than “you’re living in a fantasy world because it helps you ignore real problems.”
Well, it’s not necessarily “you could choose to be realistic, and are ignoring it”. It might be “you don’t have the skills to see things realistically” or “you don’t have the skills to see negative things clearly”. “Clearly” isn’t the same thing as “usefully”, of course – social interactions often go much better if the other person thinks that you impute only good motives to them. The problem I’m complaining about is that telling someone who is perceiving threat that they’re just flat-out wrong isn’t a very therapeutic move. (It doesn’t work well with psychosis, either – and there people actually *are* wrong about threat in the environment.)
I think the study suggests that anxious people make each other more anxious, but only so long as it remains subliminal.
August 13, 2007, 5:25 pm