Abstract
Socially anxious and nonanxious college students provided detailed personal information and were led to believe that they would soon interact with a person of the opposite sex who was either similar or dissimilar to them in terms of background, experience, and other attributes. In accord with the social psychological literature, nonanxious students greatly preferred similar to dissimilar partners. Socially anxious students showed no difference between their ratings of similar and dissimilar partners and assigned much less extreme ratings to both partners than did nonanxious subjects. Subjects' predictions about partners' likely anxiety and how partners would evaluate subjects' anxiety also differed according to subjects' anxiety levels, but these differences did not parallel attraction scores. Results are compared with other research on social anxiety and contrasted to past research on social anxiety, attitude similarity, and attraction. Directions for future research are addressed, and questions about the validity of the thought-listing technique are discussed.
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We wish to thank Andrew Moskoff for his assistance in completing the project, and Drs. Donn Byrne, Robert Becker, and Kevin Keller for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
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Heimberg, R.G., Acerra, M.C. & Holstein, A. Partner similarity mediates interpersonal anxiety. Cogn Ther Res 9, 443–453 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01173092
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01173092