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. 2019 Apr 4;10(2):2043808719837811.
doi: 10.1177/2043808719837811. eCollection 2019 Apr.

Accessing social media: Help or hindrance for people with social anxiety?

Sophie E Carruthers  1 , Emma L Warnock-Parkes  1 , David M Clark  2
Affiliations

Accessing social media: Help or hindrance for people with social anxiety?

Sophie E Carruthers et al. J Exp Psychopathol. .

Abstract

Despite increasing use of social media and the potential benefits for people with social anxiety (SA) disorder, little is known about the online experience of people with SA. Our study aimed to investigate the occurrence of cognitive and behavioral processes during a series of online and off-line Facebook (FB)-based tasks among individuals with high and low levels of SA. Sixty-one undergraduates with low or high SA were asked to use FB in a laboratory setting, to make an FB post, and to imagine three ambiguous FB scenarios. Participants with high SA reported higher anxiety throughout the study with an interaction effect, indicating greater relative increases in anxiety for those with high SA over low SA across tasks. The high SA group were more likely to negatively interpret the ambiguous FB scenarios than the low SA group. They also reported using more safety-seeking behaviors and having more negative thoughts. The findings suggest that the cognitive and behavioral processes that characterize socially anxious face-to-face interaction are also evident in online communication. Suggestions are made for the clinical implications of such findings.

Keywords: Facebook; negative thoughts; safety behaviors; social anxiety; social media; social networking.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Anxiety ratings of participants from the low (blue) and high (red) SA groups across the four experimental phases with 95% confidence intervals. Anxiety ratings were made on a 0–10 scale (0 = not at all anxious, 10 = the most anxious I could feel). FB = Facebook, SA = social anxiety.
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