Social Anxiety and it’s Impacts on Social Interactions

Social competence refers to how individuals engage in interactions, and is considered a crucial skill towards development (Junge et. al. 2020). Studies have examined the negative impact of social anxiety on aspects of social competence in non-autistic individuals (Pickard et al., 2018). Recently, the negative impact of social competence challenges on social anxiety has also been examined in autistic individuals (Espeloer et al., 2021; Stark et al., 2022). In general, females experience increased adverse friendship-related risk factors (Pickering et. al, 2020) and outcomes (La Greca & Lopez, 1998) from social anxiety. However, most studies to date have not used real-world situations to measure how social anxiety impacts social interactions (Spain et al., 2018). The Investigating Social Patterns in Youth (I-SPY) Study at Stony Brook University collected rich observational data on social interactions between autistic and non-autistic adolescents coded using the Social Interaction Observation Scale (Bauminger, 2002) and data from Social Anxiety Scale (La Greca & Stone, 2010; La Greca & Lopez, 1998). The proposed study will use this data to (1) examine the relationship between social anxiety and positive social interactions, and (2) explore gender and other potential moderators of this relationship (e.g., autistic traits, comorbid diagnoses, experience with bullies). We hypothesize that higher social anxiety will lead to lower positive social interaction scores. Furthermore, we anticipate that females will show higher social anxiety in general and a reduced amount of positive social interaction than boys. Data collection is complete and data analysis will be completed prior to symposium day.