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Social Anxiety and Empathy for Social Pain

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Abstract

We examined whether dispositional social anxiety influenced empathy for individuals who experience aversive social events. Participants (N = 121) were randomly assigned to an experimental condition designed to increase state anxiety via social threat or to a control condition. They then observed videos of target individuals discussing high school events in which they were either socially included or excluded. Both participants and targets rated the emotions the targets felt when discussing those situations. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that social anxiety was associated with greater accuracy for targets’ negative social emotions but only under conditions of social threat. These results suggest that individual differences in social anxiety may influence empathic accuracy for others’ social pain.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. The significant main effect of social anxiety indicated that social anxiety predicted greater NA accuracy, suggesting that overall, individuals with higher levels of social anxiety were more accurate at rating targets’ negative affect. While interesting, this main effect was qualified by the three-way interaction.

  2. Analyses were also conducted using a discrepancy variable (i.e., the directional difference between participant and target ratings), where negative scores indicate that participants underestimated targets’ negative affect and positive scores indicate that participants overestimated. There was a significant two-way interaction within the exclusion videos, b = -.07, t = 2.38, p = .02. Follow-up analyses revealed that the slope of social anxiety was only significant within the experimental condition, b = .05, t = 2.28, p = .02. On average, individuals with low social anxiety underestimated target affect (M = -6.26, SD = 11.99) more than individuals with high social anxiety (M = −2.92, SD = 10.62).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to the first author, and a SSHRC research Grant to the second author. There are no other financial disclosures to report.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Karen W. Auyeung & Lynn E. Alden

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  1. Karen W. Auyeung
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  2. Lynn E. Alden
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Correspondence to Karen W. Auyeung.

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Karen W. Auyeung and Lynn E. Alden declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures in the current research were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Behavioural Research Ethics Board at the University of British Columbia (ID# H11-02526). All participants provided fully informed consent.

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Auyeung, K.W., Alden, L.E. Social Anxiety and Empathy for Social Pain. Cogn Ther Res 40, 38–45 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-015-9718-0

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