Humans are social animals who share emotions and cooperate with others. During adolescence, in particular, social bonding becomes increasingly important. At this age, it is normal to worry about others’ opinions and feel nervous in social interactions. During social interactions, maladaptive cognitive and affective processes heighten levels of social anxiety. One prominent cognitive disturbance lies in maladaptive metacognitive beliefs: the ability to judge thought processes. Affective disturbances are reflected in the body’s state of arousal, most prominently observable in heart rate variability (the fluctuations in time between heartbeats). The exact nature of the relationship between these two types of disturbances on the one hand, and social anxiety symptoms on the other, is unclear. What is clear is that social anxiety makes adolescents avoid interacting with peers, resulting in feelings of loneliness, social isolation, low quality of life, and, in some cases, a full-blown (and difficult to cure) Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). The current project aims to i) reveal the causal effects of cognitive and affective disturbances that contribute to adolescents’ social anxiety and ii) put forward a digital intervention to target them.
With state-of-the-art cognitive, behavioral, and physiological measures, this project examines whether regulating cognitive and affective disturbances reduces SAD symptoms both from the first-person and the second-person perspective (self-experience, objective measures including the analysis of physiological signals and emotional expressions, and peer-evaluation). Furthermore, we take the first step into examining the short- and long-term effectiveness of existing interventions, innovatively, on reducing symptoms and improving the social functioning of highly socially anxious adolescents.
Socially anxious adolescents tend to be hesitant in seeking therapy because of their fear of social exposure and negative evaluations. To circumvent this problem, interventions should be easily accessible. A digital intervention has a lower threshold and suits adolescents, who tend to be open to technological advances. In the current project, we target the cognitive component, specifically metacognitive disturbances, via a digital detached mindfulness. To target the affective component, we use the slow breathing (SB) technique, which has been shown to directly increase HRV (higher HRV is a common index for health) and has been proven effective in adults with depression. The current project will design a mobile app intervention to investigate the effectiveness of targeting cognitive and affective disturbances in lowering social anxiety and improving real-life social functioning in socially anxious adolescents.
We are currently recruiting adolescents aged 16-20 years old to take part in our studies. If you are interested, please, follow this link.
