Does social anxiety modulate self and others’ perspectives in self-judgement?

Details

Supervisors

Philippot, Pierre

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Rigidly maintaining a critical judgement of oneself, from one's own perspective or from the perspective of another is one of the vulnerabilities of social anxiety. Interestingly social anxious people are also more flexible when adopting a negative perspective of themselves. Self-judgement is generally in terms of competence and cooperation. Therefore, first, we assume that socially anxious individuals are sensitive to this dimension of competence in self-presentation and, second, we hypothesize that they readily adopt the critical perspective of another but more difficultly a benevolent self-perspective. Third, we also assume that their social anxiety moderates the cost of shifting from this critical other-centred perspective to the self-perspective perspective when they make a negative judgment of themselves. Therefore, we aim to find out if social anxiety modulates the perspective of the self and the other when making a judgment about the self. The relationships between flexibility in perspective shifting, competence and self-judgment were examined using a choice paradigm. Our results confirm the sensitivity of social anxious people to the dimension of competence and the adoption of a negative self-view. Furthermore, these results are promising in showing that social anxiety disorder is related to moderating the cost of shifting from the perspective of a critical other to the perspective of the self, when one has to adopt a positive and incongruous view of the self.