
New research targets sufferers of social anxiety disorder
- Sufferers of social anxiety have markedly different personality traits than others.
- By understanding these traits, researchers at Uppsala believe targeted therapies could evolve.
- Social anxiety affects 15 million American adults every year.
In his essay, “The problem of anxiety,” Sigmund Freud wrote that anxiety is the “fundamental phenomenon and the central problem of neurosis.” You will not find a final word on the subject in Freud’s writing, however. His theories on anxiety evolved throughout his life. By the end of his illustrious and contentious career, he admitted that he would likely never completely define what anxiety entails.
That doesn’t mean his contributions were for naught. No one contributed as much to our understanding of the unconscious drives that fuel our reality. Freud’s ideas about sexuality are regularly debated—even he moved away from his earlier work—yet he knew what others, such as Kierkegaard and Rank, recognized: Anxiety is our natural state. To be conscious is to have anxiety. It’s the cost of being able to foresee the future. How you deal with that anxiety in large part defines your personality.
Freud terms objective anxiety “anxious readiness.” This function arms an individual so that they will not be surprised by sudden threats. Being overly prepared, however, leads to problems: your actions are paralyzed. This is the “freeze” function of our nervous system. This is also the basis of social anxiety: an inability to be in public, or, when you must go out, the sheer terror of being among others.
Social anxiety: How to rewire your confidence and be a better communicator | Andrew Horn
New research from Uppsala University, published in the journal PLOS ONE, investigates the ramifications of social anxiety. The conclusion that lead author Tomas Furmark comes to: sufferers of social anxiety disorders exhibit different personality traits than others.
Personality is defined by the Big Five traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each of these traits operate along a spectrum. Are you curious or cautious? Are you compassionate toward your partner or are you emotionally detached? Do you step into the center of a party or are you the perpetual wallflower that leaves out the back door?
Context matters. You might be extroverted in an environment in which you’re comfortable, exuding a ton of confidence. Walk next door and suddenly you’re reserved and nervous. Anxiety is tethered to environment and your personality isn’t fixed. You can change your place on any of the spectrums, which is the goal of therapy.
For sufferers of social anxiety—15 million American adults every year—lateral movement is difficult. Just as depressed people often cannot envision the future, the socially anxious find it challenging to be in public. There’s context here as well. The supermarket might be easy but that cocktail party is never going to happen. At the extreme end, social anxiety means only leaving your home for specific, targeted purposes, and even those trips make you anxious.
Photo by Ahmed Nishaath on Unsplash
The team at Uppsala asked 265 volunteers with social anxiety to fill out comprehensive personality surveys. They identified three groups based on cluster analysis: prototypical social anxiety disorder (33 percent), whose members appear highly anxious and introverted; introvert-conscientious social anxiety disorder (29 percent), whose members are introverted but also have high levels of conscientiousness; and unstable-open social anxiety disorder (38 percent), with individuals scoring high on openness.
While the causes of each disorder differ, Fumark and his team identified specific personality traits that appear to be universal: high neuroticism and introversion, emotional instability, and a tendency to turn inward.
The researchers believe that defining these traits helps to expand our understanding of social anxiety disorders, which helps therapists target each subtype. As the team concludes,
“SAD personality subtypes may have different etiologies and it seems plausible that individuals exhibiting vastly different personality characteristics require different treatment strategies.”
For example, cognitive behavioral therapy could be utilized with social approach focus to treat SAD sufferers with depression or low energy. Targeted approaches might work better for patients with certain types of traits as compared to others with different traits. As always, the team recommends further research, but this seems to be an important step in understanding the many shades of social anxiety.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His next book is “Hero’s Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy.”
8 comments
«Lenin once said, “There are decades in which nothing happens; and there are weeks in which decades happen.”» – Lenin?
Wow, you know the works of this cannibal! But have you read his orders to take hostages and shoot them mercilessly? It would be better if you quoted Hitler.
I’ve always been a touch-averse person. By default I respect personal space, and expect the same. When touched unexpectedly I used to jump ten feet in the air, a habit I was forced to break when my cat started jumping from the sink to my shoulder every time I went to take a piss (it’s no fun cleaning errant piss sprays off everything while your shoulder is still bleeding). Now I only jump ten feet in the air on the inside.
This is not how I was raised. My mom always thought I was weird for being like this. But apparently I’ve been like this since I was a baby.
However when I’ve been in relationships I’ve always desired them to be a release valve for a repressed desire to touch and be touched. Yet I only ever seem to become involved with similarly touch-averse women (who unlike me, seem additionally to not require a release valve for their touch-aversion).
Yet even as casual touch has become demonized in recent years, I still understand that I’m the weird one. I tolerate back-patting as one immersed in a foreign country might tolerate a local custom that they might find unseemly in their home country. Just because I’m an alien does not mean I think all others should be as alienated as me.
I hope as a consequence of this crisis that people will see what they had now that it’s gone, and when it’s over decide they want it back. I promise I will try to contain my startledness if they do.
I began first noticing the all-pervasive omnipresence of the pop-psychology self-sufficiency cult in the early 1970’s, and after first trying to dismiss it as a probably short-lived passing pop-culture fad eventually realized it was unfortunately probably fated to stay with us a long, long time. It struck me as almost the exact opposite of the pop-culture *Zeitgeist* of the 1960’s which I thought could be epitomized by songs like the Beatles’ “All you need is love” and Barbra Streisand’s “People who need people, are the luckiest people in the world.” When I told one “personal growth” devotee in 1975 or 1976 of my liking for Barbra Streisand’s “People” song, he primly retorted that “people who need people” are really the *unluckiest* people because they have so little self-esteem and such poor inner resources! As I wrote last night, he almost sounded as if he were telling me to feel ashamed of myself for not aspiring to be a self-contained self-sufficient hermit content to stay by myself in my room all day raptly contemplating the beauty of my own inner self-esteem!
Oops: “Like…the 2008 financial crisis, this pandemic is one of the epochal moments that will define the twentieth century…” It’s 2020, meaning, it’s the twenty-first century, right?
Oh, good grief! Thank you, Benjamin.
I’ve also long suspected that the popularity since the 1970’s of this pop self-help psychology with its celebration of self-sufficiency and derogation of so-called “neediness” may well have something to do with the growing ascendancy ever since that self-same decade of economic neoliberalism, with its classic *reductio ad absurdum* in Margaret Thatcher’s famous or infamous remark that “There is no such thing as society.” One might say that the “needy” soul admitting loneliness and yearning for friendship or love is pop psychology’s counterpart to the “moochers” and “welfare bums” demonized by the ardent apostles of neoliberalism. As I myself sometimes used to remark back in the 1970’s with regard to that decades best-selling “inspirational” saga of a self-actualizing seabird, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull flies with Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan”–to whom I could have also added Margaret Thatcher.
One cultural trend of the last few decades which I also sometimes feel may have contributed to the increasing “de-valorization” (to coin a postmodernese–“critical yheory” neologism though I generally have little love for that lingo) of personal contact has been the post-1970 pop self-help psychology cult of self-sufficiency, “liking yourself,” and “being your own best friend,” with its constant insistence that we should not depend on other people for our happiness, and its disparagement of “neediness” as a despicable weakness. Reading some “psychobabbling” self-help books in the last few decades, or listening to people spout that stuff at me on occasions over the tears when I’ve expressed feelings of loneliness or wishing for more friends or a better social circle, I’ve occasionally almost gotten the feeling that they believe we should feel ashamed of needing or wanting friends or companions, that they would prefer for all of us to sit by ourselves in our own tooms all day bliisfully contemplating the rosy-golden beauty of our own self-sufficient self-esteem!