Embarrassment and social phobia: the role of parasympathetic activation
Section snippets
Embarrassment and social phobia: the role of parasympathetic activation
Social phobia is defined as a marked and persistent fear of social or performance situations in which embarrassment may occur (DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Astonishingly, only few researchers have tried to investigate embarrassment among social phobics directly. There are two main reasons to consider embarrassment as a promising avenue towards understanding social phobia. First, research has shown the profound impact of embarrassment on behavior. For example, embarrassment
Participants
Thirty social phobics (DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994) were recruited by advertisements in local newspapers asking either for people with fear of blushing or with fear of speaking in front of other people. In addition, 14 controls were recruited by advertisements asking for people that usually enjoy social situations. Presence or absence of a diagnosis of social phobia was established with the Anxiety Disorder Interview Schedule (ADIS-IV, Di Nardo, Brown, & Barlow, 1994). Mean
Self-report measures
Since control participants reported almost no distress, variance in this group is much smaller than in the social phobic group. F-statistics are misleading when means are correlated with variances across cells of the design, and therefore, it was not possible to use MANOVAs to analyze differences between social phobics and controls or changes within subjects. Consequently, we employed Mann–Whitney U-tests to establish group differences in self-reported embarrassment and anxiety and paired t
Discussion
Our goal was to determine whether parasympathetic activation plays an important role in embarrassment in those who are socially phobic and in those who are not. We approached this by devising a task that we hoped would induce embarrassment in both groups, and in terms of self-reported embarrassment, we succeeded. As expected, embarrassment ratings in the control group were much lower than in social phobics (Table 2), and in social phobics ratings of anxiety were high as well. Embarrassment and
Acknowledgements
Alexander L. Gerlach, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Department of Psychology, Institute I, Psychological Assessment and Clinical Psychology, Westfalian Wilhelms University of Münster, Münster, Germany; Frank H. Wilhelm and Walton T. Roth, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine and Veterans Administration Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA. This research was supported by the
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