As a new school year begins, many children are thinking about friendships, fitting in, and what their classmates think of them.
While these social challenges are a normal part of growing up, some children worry more intensely about being judged by others.
New research from UBC Psychology explored how social anxiety shapes the way children understand other people’s thoughts and feelings.
Shannon M. Craig, the study’s lead author and an MA student in UBC’s department of psychology, shares insights about the relationship between anxiety and social awareness and how parents and caregivers can help children as they head back-to-school.
Can you tell us about this research?
Our study explored the relationship between social anxiety in children and their ability to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. Over the past few decades, there have been mixed findings regarding this relationship, so we used a multi-measure approach, investigating whether using different kinds of measures would help to explain the conflicting results in past studies. We found that children with higher levels of social anxiety, specifically with a greater fear of negative evaluation, showed greater accuracy in reasoning about the minds of others in lab settings but when we asked their parents about their performance in more natural settings, those with a higher fear of evaluation were reported as experiencing more challenges in reasoning about others’ mental states. These findings need to be confirmed in future studies but suggest that future research will benefit from examining different aspects of social anxiety and different ways of testing children’s social reasoning abilities.
What did this research reveal about socially anxious children—and how they understand other people’s thoughts and feelings?
Our research suggests that the way socially anxious children reason about the thoughts and feelings of others varies depending on the social context and the type of anxiety they experience . We found that children with higher social anxiety in the form of increased worries about negative evaluation from others showed greater accuracy in reasoning about the minds of others when asked by a researcher directly, yet in everyday social situations, they experienced more challenges. This could suggest that socially anxious children, specifically those with a higher fear of negative evaluation, are more motivated to apply themselves in lab-based settings for fear of critique or failure but may be more likely to withdraw in more complex social contexts for fear of what other people are thinking about them.
Why might children who worry a lot about what others think of them find social situations challenging?
Earlier research suggests that children with a higher fear of negative evaluation find social situations difficult for two main reasons. First, the fear of what others are thinking can lead to a heightened self-focus and worry over the way they present themselves in social settings, resulting in missed social cues and feeling at a loss in social settings. Second, the fear of what others are thinking can sometimes lead socially anxious children to ‘overmentalize’, meaning that they attribute more thoughts to others than is necessary. For example, they may believe that another person is angry with them because they are being quiet when that person is just tired, which can further lead to feelings of discomfort and anxiety in social situations.
As children head back to school, what can parents do to help children who worry too much about what other people think of them?
Parents may be able to help their children’s anxiety by teaching them that others aren’t thinking about them or judging them nearly as much as they believe. For example, parents can ask children if they ever judge their friends that harshly and explain that their peers are similarly forgiving in their evaluations, and in fact often don’t even notice others’ mistakes because they are focusing on their own. It’s also important for parents to note that some degree of social anxiety is perfectly normal and can even be beneficial. Additionally, when consuming media like TV shows, movies, or books, it can be helpful to talk to kids about the thoughts and feelings of the different characters. This practice helps children make realistic inferences about the minds of others.
The Anxious Mind: Examining the Conflicting Relationships Between Distinct Aspects of Social Anxiety and Social Cognition was co-authored by Dr. Susan Birch and Dr. Kiley Hamlin and published in Behavioral Sciences.
