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The current preregistration is for secondary analyses of an existing dataset collected from an online, cross-sectional study conducted by the authors. In the original study, undergraduate student participants read vignettes where they imagined themselves committing a social blunder, then were presented with either explicitly compassionate (compassionate condition) or generally positive (control condition) feedback, and provided ratings of valence, arousal, and self-appraisals in response to the feedback. The current secondary analyses aim to answer and elaborate on new research questions that were initially posed as exploratory questions and not previously analyzed. Key differences between the current preregistered analyses and those conducted in the original study include: (1) conceptualization of the main predictor variable (social anxiety) as a continuous variable instead of using a dichotomous median split (low social anxiety group vs. high social anxiety group), and (2) analysis of a previously unexamined moderator variable, fears of receiving compassion from others. Additionally, the planned statistical approach for the current preregistered secondary analyses differs from the original study by including linear mixed effects models in a multilevel modeling (MLM) framework, which more appropriately accounts for the data’s multilevel structure (participants and trials crossed, with trials nested within condition) and the combination of categorical and continuous predictor variables in a series of nested models. This approach also allows for variance partitioning and accounting for individual differences in responses.

This fully online study seeks to investigate the effects of social anxiety and self-schemas on the nature, accessibility, and appraisals of positive versus negative autobiographical memories in a community sample of Prolific participants.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis with continued widespread community transmission and a significant impact on all facets of society. In attempts to curb the spread of COVID-19, scientific and healthcare communities have recommended preventive measures such as social distancing, self-isolation, and quarantine to limit viral transmission from person to person. Although these preventive measures can protect physical health, they are likely to have adverse effects on mental health. In particular, those with anxiety symptoms may have especially strong psychological responses to the suggested preventive measures and the high levels of uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we aim to examine how various aspects of distancing are affecting people with elevated obsessive-compulsive, social anxiety, health anxiety, and generalized anxiety symptoms. Through this study, we will be able to better understand how a global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic influences anxiety symptoms, and ideally find ways to alleviate these symptoms by directly addressing identified core fears and worries specific to the outbreak. This project is affiliated with the University of Waterloo and has received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

This study will investigate the relationship between social anxiety (SA) and friendship expectations. The tendency to experience SA has been linked to having less satisfying friendships (Cuming & Rapee, 2010; Hur et al., 2020; Rodebaugh et al., 2015; Torgrud et al., 2004) but reasons for this are currently unclear. We think that individuals with higher SA might be more concerned that those with lower SA about revealing personal flaws to their close friends. We also think that higher SA individuals might interpret relatively minor violations of friendship expectations more negatively than people with lower trait SA, thus contributing to more negative emotional experiences within their friendships. In this study, a sample of undergraduate students will complete self-report questionnaires that assess SA, mood, concerns about revealing personal flaws to friends, and expectations of close friends. Each participant will also react to a series of hypothetical friendship scenarios for which they will judge whether a more negative or a more positive outcome is more likely to occur. On half of the trials, the vignette outcome will be revealed as being consistent with their expectations, and for the other trials, participants will be told that their expected outcome did not occur. In either case, participants will write why they think their friend in the vignette behaved as they did and rate their own affective experiences in that moment. Primary analyses will examine the relationship between levels of SA, people’s friendship expectations, and their reactions to violations of expectations. Findings could shed light on the factors that link higher SA with lower friendship satisfaction. This project is affiliated with the University of Waterloo and has received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

This study seeks to examine how social anxiety influences the ways in which people respond to painful social exclusion.

Social anxiety (SA) is characterized by a fear of scrutiny and evaluation in social situations, with concerns fueled by the perception that one will be unable to make their desired impression on others. Whereas research has primarily investigated SA in the context of social performance situations and first-meeting encounters, this study will investigate the relationship between SA and the salience of being unable to meet a close friend’s needs or expectations. In the face of such threat salience, we expect higher SA to be linked to experiences of more intense negative emotions and lower feelings of safeness in the target friendship. To test this, a sample of undergraduate students will complete an online study, in which participants are randomly assigned to either an experimental manipulation in which discrepancy threat is introduced by imagining a close friend describing one thing they wish to change about them, or to a neutral condition, in which they imagine their friend engaging in any one activity on their own. Following the threat or no-threat exercise, all participants will be asked to imagine the same ambiguous situation that describes a possible friendship rupture. Participants will complete self-report outcome measures that assess trait SA, interpersonal safeness and threat, emotional experiences, and friendship goals. We will examine the effects of condition on these key outcome variables and whether such effects are moderated by participants levels of trait SA. Findings will shed light on the factors that link higher SA with lower friendship satisfaction. This project is affiliated with the University of Waterloo and has received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

The goal of this study is to investigate (a) whether both relational and nonrelational contexts are similarly effective at repairing ruptured needs in the aftermath of a painful exclusion, and (b) whether the effectiveness of repair across relational and nonrelational contexts differs depending on participants’ levels of trait social anxiety (SA).

The purpose of this study is to understand the effects of mental simulation and social anxiety on participants’ problem-solving abilities. The first aim is to understand whether a type of mental simulation called "process simulation" in which participants visualize the step-by-step problem solving process will lead to better problem solving outcomes than a comparison "outcome simulation" condition in which participants visualize the resolution of the problem (i.e., the outcome) and a no-training control condition. Past research has shown process simulation to be superior to outcome simulation across a variety of contexts (Escalas & Luce, 2003; Escalas & Luce, 2004; Pham & Taylor, 1999; Taylor & Armor, 1997, as cited in Taylor et al., 1998), but ours will be the first to investigate its effects on social problem solving. The second aim of this study is understand whether and how trait social anxiety impacts problem solving abilities across and between conditions. Our third aim is to examine whether the effects of social anxiety are unique to social problems or extend across both social and nonsocial problems. Past research has shown that high socially anxious individuals tend to doubt their ability to solve problems effectively (Fergus et al., 2015; Hearn et al., 2017; Romano et al., 2019) and also show deficits in generating active solutions to social problems when they attempt to solve hypothetical social problems from their own perspective (Romano et al., 2019). This research has the potential to facilitate the development of more effective interventions that would help high socially anxious individuals to learn beneficial problem-solving strategies. This project is affiliated with the University of Waterloo and has received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

The purpose of this study is to understand how social interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic affect how those with social anxiety interpret and experience these social exchanges, relative to those without social anxiety. Given the prominence of mask-wearing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the primary aim of our study is to extend the currently limited literature on how social anxiety might impact interpretations of masked versus unmasked faces during social interactions by conducting an online experimental study. One aim of this study is to understand the effects of trait social anxiety on negative interpretation biases during masked versus unmasked interactions with those who depict either a positive or neutral face in either a masked or unmasked condition. Negative interpretation bias plays a substantial role in social anxiety, as socially anxious individuals tend to distort the social cues they perceive (Clark & Wells, 1995; Hirsch et al., 2016), interpreting vague social situations quite negatively and perceiving mildly negative social situations as having catastrophic social consequences (Chen et al., 2020). Another aim is to understand the effects of trait social anxiety on positivity deficits during these same types of social interactions, specifically looking into the positive/masked and positive/unmasked conditions, as socially anxious individuals tend to have difficulties in retrieving positive memories and recalling positive social feedback, along with the tendency to interpret positive social scenarios in a more negative manner (Glazier & Alden, 2019; Romano et al., 2020; Vassilopoulos, 2006; Voncken et al., 2003). A third aim is to understand the effects of trait social anxiety on how long it takes to decode emotional expressions, and the confidence one has in how well they decode such expressions. In this study, participants will be asked to rate the emotional expressions of these strangers on a scale from negative to positive "as quickly and as accurately as possible", and to rate how confident they felt in their judgements. Findings from a pre-registered but unpublished study by Williams, Haque, Mai, & Venkatraman (2021) found that while participants were able to identify emotional expressions in masked faces with a level of accuracy that was well-above chance, they were both slower and less accurate in their exact identification of all emotional expressions when the lower half was covered. If empirical research studies on non-anxious participants have found that people experience considerable difficulties in determining emotional expressions when the lower half of faces are covered, those with social anxiety would likely have even greater difficulties, as their judgments about masked facial expressions may be impacted by both negative interpretation biases and/or positivity deficits, especially during ambiguous social situations and when masked expressions are positive. The specific effects of mask-wearing on social interpretation biases in social anxiety has yet to be studied empirically (Saint & Moscovitch, 2021). As the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to be felt for some time into the foreseeable future, most notably in the form of compliance with public health measures such as mask-wearing which has direct effects on people’s day-to-day interpersonal interactions, expanding the literature on the topic of mask-wearing and its impact on social anxiety is necessary. The findings from this research could have significant implications for better understanding how socially anxious individuals experience their social world since the beginning of the mask mandate. This project is affiliated with the University of Waterloo and has received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

This fully online study seeks to investigate the effects of positive memory recall in participants with high trait social anxiety. The primary research aim is to investigate the effects of positive social memory recall in participants with high levels of trait social anxiety. We anticipate that reflecting on a positive memory in a deep manner that is focused on its self-relevant meaning will be more effective for improving participants' positive affect, social safeness, and beliefs about the self and others and lowering negative affect over time in than a superficial processing control condition focused on the shallow, perceptual details of the positive memory.

This registration includes updates to our analytic plan for a pre-registered study. Please refer to the original study pre-registration for details regarding hypotheses, design, sampling, and measured variables: Ho, J.T.K., & Moscovitch, D. A. (2021, June 19). Social anxiety and affiliative adjustment during the COVID-19 pandemic. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RKSY5

This is a study to continue investigating affiliative behaviours of high socially anxious (HSA) individuals in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2020, we conducted an online study examining the effects of retrospectively self-reported pre-pandemic SA symptoms on affiliative behaviours compliant with COVID-related restrictions (e.g., texting, video calls, arranging socially distanced meet-ups, etc.) and various SA-related outcomes (e.g., loneliness, fears of negative evaluation) during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also explored the moderating effects of pre-pandemic functional impairment and current COVID-related stressors and discovered that pre-pandemic SA symptoms positively predicted how frequently participants were affiliating with others; furthermore, this relationship was strongest at higher levels of pre-pandemic impairment and greater number of COVID-related stressors. In the present study, we aim to examine any longitudinal effects and test specific hypotheses arising from our previous findings as to why HSA individuals may be affiliating more than expected. We also aim to determine whether our previous findings will replicate and generalize to a newly recruited sample. This project is affiliated with the University of Waterloo and has received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

Studies have found that socially anxious individuals are especially fearful of receiving compassion from others (Gilbert et al., 2011; Merritt & Purdon, 2020). Fear of receiving compassion from others might stem from erroneous beliefs in which compassion is appraised as threatening and likely to activate maladaptive social schemas (Eisner et al., 2009; Gilbert et al., 2011; Ho et al., 2021; Kelly & Dupasquier, 2016; see also Merritt & Purdon, 2020). Ultimately, fear of receiving compassion contributes to the increased utilization of safety behaviours (Ho et al., 2021), and decreased support seeking (Dupasquier et al., 2018) and self-compassion (Gilbert et al., 2011). Given such negative implications, we are investigating how individuals with social anxiety respond to affiliative emotions, such as compassion and care from others. Prior studies have shown that individuals with high trait social anxiety and those with social anxiety disorder tend to appraise both real and imagined social blunders as being more socially costly, embarrassing, humiliating, and likely to elicit negative responses from others than those with low trait social anxiety and those with anxiety disorders other than social anxiety disorder (Moscovitch et al., 2012, 2015). Hence, through this study, we expect to replicate past findings. Further, based on literature on positivity deficits and negative responses to positive social stimuli in social anxiety (Cohen & Huppert, 2018; Eisner et al., 2009; Kashdan & Steger, 2006; Kashdan, 2007; Kashdan, Weeks & Savostyanova, 2011; Roemer et al., 2005; Turk et al., 2005; Weeks & Howell, 2012), we aim to determine whether individuals with high vs. low social anxiety differ in their evaluation of self and others upon receiving a positive interpersonal response to their social blunder. We also aim to determine whether compassionate responses will be appraised as especially threatening for individuals with high levels of social anxiety, given that (a) compassionate responses inadvertently make the social blunder salient for the participants by explicitly mentioning the social blunder to better empathize and provide support around it; and (b) concern from others is generally perceived as a confirmation of having exposed self-perceived flaws among individuals with social anxiety (Moscovitch, 2009). Finally, given the finding that concerns about revealing self-flaws, especially appearing socially incompetent, account for unique variance in socially anxious participants’ inflated cost estimates of social blunders, over and above symptoms of social anxiety and depression (Moscovitch et al., 2015), we aim to determine that the relationship between social anxiety and negative appraisals of self and others when emotional distress about the blunder is high, especially for compassionate responses. The findings from this project could have important implications for understanding how socially anxious individuals may respond to offers of compassionate social support from others and to compassion-based approaches to treatment in clinical settings. This project is affiliated with the University of Waterloo and has received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

This fully online study seeks to investigate how the deep reliving and reflection of a positive social memory influences socially anxious individuals experience of positive affect, negative affect, social safeness, and beliefs about the self and others.

Individuals who struggle with high trait social anxiety experience an overwhelming fear of social scrutiny and possess exaggerated negative beliefs about the self (Moscovitch, 2009). Although coping adaptively with life’s struggles requires relying on social supports during times of distress (Dupasquier et al., 2018; Kelly & Dupasquier, 2016), people with high trait social anxiety often fail to interact with others in adaptive ways (Ho et al., 2021; Merritt & Purdon, 2020). One type of maladaptive social support strategy that has received surprisingly little attention in the SA literature is excessive reassurance seeking. Excessive reassurance seeking is characterized by repetitive requests of assurance from others to lessen psychological distress (Lohr et al., 2007; Parrish & Radomsky, 2010). Despite the limited research on excessive reassurance seeking and social anxiety, previous research has suggested that self-doubt and rumination may both play important roles in reassurance seeking (Clark et al., 2020). Specifically, high socially anxious individuals experience high levels of uncertainty about their personal characteristics and the impression they make on others (Wilson & Rapee, 2006). Consequently, the increased uncertainty around their social performance after an interpersonal encounter may fuel their engagement in post-event processing, a repetitive form of rumination that has been conceptualized as a misguided intrapersonal problem-solving strategy to decrease feelings of self-doubt (Kocovski & Rector, 2007). At the same time, in the presence of unresolved feelings of doubt about a recent social performance, high socially anxious individuals may experience increased urges to rely on the opinion of others through excessive reassurance seeking, which can potentially be conceptualized as a misguided interpersonal strategy that, like post-event processing, is geared toward easing uncertainty and associated feelings of distress. As post-event processing has been shown to increase feelings of anxiety and worry and may erode the accuracy of autobiographical memories for specific social events over time (Clark & Wells, 1995; Glazier & Alden, 2019), repeated engagement in post-event processing to cope with self-doubt in the aftermath of a social encounter may amplify such doubts and the associated urge to seek reassurance among those with high levels of social anxiety. The proposed research project is the first in a planned series of studies that will begin fill a much-needed gap in the literature by illuminating the nature of excessive reassurance seeking and the psychological mechanisms underlying its use among people with high trait social anxiety. Understanding how to reduce barriers for vulnerable people to receive desired social support is a critical goal that has become especially relevant during the isolating context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-erp-10.1177_08902070211014057 for None the wiser: Year-long longitudinal study on effects of adversity on wisdom by Anna Dorfman, David A Moscovitch, William J Chopik and Igor Grossmann in European Journal of Personality