How Badly Will I Feel if You Don't Like Me? Social Anxiety and Predictions of Future Affect.

Introduction: The current study investigated whether high and low socially-anxious individuals would show differences in affective forecasting accuracy (i.e., the prediction of emotional states in response to future events) to positive versus negative social evaluation. Method: High (n = 94) and low (n = 98) socially-anxious participants gave a speech and were randomly assigned to receive a positive or negative evaluation. Results: For affective forecasts made proximally (moments before the speech), those low in social anxiety overpredicted their affect to a greater extent to a negative evaluation versus a positive evaluation. In contrast, those high in social anxiety overpredicted their affect to positive and negative evaluations comparably, and failed to adjust their prediction for a future hypothetical negative evaluation—in effect, not learning from their prior forecasting error. Discussion: Results suggest that affective forecasting biases deserve further study as a maintaining factor for social anxiety symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]