The Effects of Perceived Social Rank on Socially Anxious Adolescents

Anxiety has become the United States’ most common mental health disorder affecting about one third of both adolescents and adults. The American College Health Association has also reported an increase in undergraduate students reporting “overwhelming anxiety” from 50% in 2011 to 62% in 2016. While anxiety affects individuals in different age groups, adolescence can be a time of heightened anxiety, in part because of the constant evaluation from others and because the processes that allow individuals to understand and interact with another, are still developing. Social anxiety has also been linked with perceived social rank, a system that is presumed to arise out of the competition for resources. Socially anxious individuals view themselves as being of lower ranking in the hierarchal system and therefore believe they are incapable of competing with those above them. The goal of the present study was to determine if socially anxious adolescents feel they are of a lower social rank. Participants were 46 individuals from a small liberal arts university in northern California. Participants were given the Social Comparison Scale along with the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale and a series of demographic questions. The results suggest that socially anxious individuals with a perceived lower social rank will exhibit higher levels of social anxiety. In a society highly driven by the desire to attend college and greatly affected by anxiety, it is important to further explore relationships between anxiety and other factors to work towards a solution to this social problem. EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED SOCIAL RANK 3 The Effects of Perceived Social Rank on Socially Anxious Adolescents Anxiety has become the United States’ most common mental health disorder affecting about one third of both adolescents and adults (Kessler et al., 2005). The American College Health Association has also reported an increase in undergraduate students reporting “overwhelming anxiety” from 50% in 2011 to 62% in 2016 (Denizet-Lewis, 2017). While anxiety affects individuals in different age groups, adolescence can be a time of heightened anxiety, in part because of the constant evaluation from others and because the processes that allow individuals to understand and interact with another are still developing (Kilford, Garrett, & Blakemore, 2016). The evolutionary purpose of anxiety is to help people detect dangerous circumstances, but highly anxious individuals experience an overactive fight-or-flight response, causing them to overestimate danger. With this being said, young people who have been raised in abusive homes or who live in communities impacted by poverty or violence may exhibit anxiety as a logical reaction to unpredictable circumstances. On the other hand children from affluent communities are often faced with a constant pressure to succeed and are overloaded with activities that they should excel in in order to feel up to par. Regardless of class and background, adolescence is a crucial time for relationship development and a time period where individuals are heavily focused on how their peers evaluate them. Social anxiety includes the element of the feeling of a heightened sense of danger that is common in general anxiety, but it is distinguished by a strong desire to make a positive impression of oneself on others, along with insecurity about one’s ability to do so (Purdon, Antony, Monteiro, & Swinson, 2001). Purdon et al. explored a few concepts on how the recognition of anxiety in other individuals influences the observer’s impressions of personal characteristics, and how normative data could be determined from the frequency in which EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED SOCIAL RANK 4 individuals experience particular symptoms of social anxiety in a nonclinical sample. Cognitive– behavioral models of social anxiety suggest that it is maintained by unreasonably high standards for social performance, frequently assuming that others view us as inadequate and assuming that these beliefs are true (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). For example, Clark and Wells (1995) stated that individuals with social anxiety tend to rely on internal feelings as a way to judge whether a social situation is going well instead of measuring their performance through direct input from participants (like eye contact). The 81 undergraduate student volunteers who participated in the Clark and Wells’ study had a mean age of 25 and were provided the Social Phobia Scale (Mattick & Clarke, 1998) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (Mattick & Clarke, 1998) to assess the anxiety felt both when anticipating being observed and while actually being observed. The Marlow-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) was also used to assess whether or not the participants were responding truthfully or misrepresenting themselves in order to portray themselves in a certain fashion. This scale includes 33-items reflecting culturally acceptable and approved behaviors that are highly unlikely to occur. For example one of the items states, “I’m always willing to admit it when I make a mistake”. The results suggested that socially anxious individuals may underestimate the extent to which others become anxious and actually show signs of anxiety, indicating that they may not be able to detect demonstrations of anxiety. The study also revealed that participants who were socially anxious were likely to view others showing signs of anxiety as less attractive and as having less strength of character. In another study conducted by George and Stopa (2008), highly socially anxious participants were both more anxious and more publicly self-aware than their low socially anxious counterparts and increases in anxiety and awareness in response to experimental EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED SOCIAL RANK 5 manipulations related to self-focus. These data reinforce the notion that socially anxious individuals place a great deal of importance on self-perception. Adolescence is a time when individuals begin to form complex hierarchal interpersonal relationships and when individuals are more sensitive to acceptance and rejection by their peers (Kilford et al., 2016). During this period individuals tend to have strong emotional responses to social situations, which can produce a variety of feelings from happiness to anxiety and in turn can affect self-perception. In order to understand the relationship between social interaction and anxiety during adolescence it is important to explore aspects of social cognition, the processes that allow individuals to understand and interact with one another. The complexity of social cognition processes such as facial expression processing and the ability to understand the mental state of oneself and others continues to develop through adolescence and into early adulthood. Mentalising refers to the ability to comprehend and predict the mental states, intentions, and actions of others. Face processing allows us to gain information from individuals around us including emotional expression, orientation of eye gaze, and identity, but in adolescence new aspects of face processing develop to include judgments of attractiveness and social status. In order to distinguish the specifics of social interaction, Kocijan and Harris (2016) conducted a study to investigate the relationships among a fear of negative evaluation, fear of positive evaluation and measures of social anxiety and depression. Fear of negative evaluation refers to distress in relation to the expectation of unfavorable evaluations from others about one’s appearance, while fear of positive evaluation refers to anxiety related to favorable evaluation in social and public situations due to the discomfort associated with social interaction. The sample was comprised of 35 individuals who contacted a psychology training clinic that provided outpatient group treatment for social anxiety after finding out about the program from an online EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED SOCIAL RANK 6 website. The Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale (Weeks, Heimberg, Rodebaugh, & Norton, 2008) was used to assess fear and distress related to positive evaluation from others and included statements such as, “I feel uneasy when I receive praise from authority figures. ” Statements are rated on a 10-point Likert scale. The Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation-Straightforward SelfInventory (Rodebaugh, Woods, Thissen, Heimberg, Chambless, & Rapee, 2004) was used to assess worry and concern related to negative evaluation from others, including statements such as, “I am frequently afraid of other people noticing my shortcomings,” rated on a 5-point Likert scale. Next the Social Phobia Scale (Mattick & Clarke, 1998) was used to measure social anxiety, along with the Beck Depression Inventory-II (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) to measure depression. The findings from the study indicated that the relationship between the measures of social anxiety and depression and fear of negative evaluation are independent from the fear of positive evaluation, indicating that fear of positive evaluation is a unique predictor of social interaction anxiety but not of performance anxiety or depression. As mentioned previously, face processing is an important aspect of social cognition and is often associated with impairments related to social anxiety (Weickowski et al., 2016). Weickowski and her colleagues examined adolescent anxiety in relation to facial emotion recognition (FER). They specifically looked at the differences in the ability to recognize emotions such as fear and anger between individuals with high versus low levels of social anxiety symptoms. They hypothesized that fear recognition in adolescents would be correlated with symptoms of social anxiety and that these differences would be gender specific. The participants in this study included 64 adolescents (43 females and 21 males) between the ages of 12-17. Participants were provided with a link to an online survey in which