The art of navigating social interactions: capturing social anxiety where it matters most

Introduction

Social anxiety (SA) has a profound impact on social functioning, but there is limited understanding of how SA individuals navigate the challenges of everyday social situations. These challenges consist of deciding how to communicate with others and how to regulate emotions evoked by those interactions, often under time pressure and swiftly changing demands. Yet, the field has largely neglected the dynamic and socially interactive character of the challenges faced by SA individuals.

Project Overview

This project builds on my conceptual innovation: SA should be studied where it matters most, during dynamic social interactions, considering emotion regulation decisions. It also builds on my methodological expertise: measuring neural dynamics during communication. These innovative backgrounds allow me to now develop a new neurocognitive framework for understanding the challenges SA individuals face when dealing with the communicative and emotional demands of social interactions.

Research Objectives

1. Communicative Problem Solving (WP1)
   I will test how SA pairs solve communicative problems under evaluative pressure, while brain activity in each pair is simultaneously measured. I will use advanced methods to quantify how pairs use their shared history to explore novel solutions to the communicative challenge.

2. Emotion Regulation Strategies (WP2)
   Further, I will identify neural systems supporting the selection of strategies to regulate emotions evoked by social stimuli. Casting emotion regulation as a dynamic decision-making problem between regulatory strategies moves the field beyond current SA research on the (in)ability to execute a single strategy.

3. Behavioral Rigidity (WP3)
   Finally, I will test whether difficulties to flexibly deal with communicative (WP1) and emotion regulation (WP2) demands in social settings can be explained by rigidity to adjust behavior in unpredictable environments.

Conclusion

Explaining the social challenges that SA individuals face in daily life will move the field beyond traditional approaches unable to capture the dynamics of typically changing social situations.