Adolescent Safety Behaviors and Social Anxiety: Links to Psychosocial Impairments and Functioning with Unfamiliar Peer Confederates.
Teens who mix high social anxiety with safety behaviors show clear social-skills deficits you can see and count.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Okuno et al. (2022) asked high-school students to fill out surveys about social anxiety and safety behaviors. Then they watched each teen talk with an unfamiliar peer.
The team scored how well the teens communicated during the short chat. They also asked parents and teachers about day-to-day social problems.
What they found
Teens who rated themselves high on both social anxiety and safety behaviors showed the weakest social skills in the live conversation. They also had more daily social problems at school and home.
Safety behaviors alone did not hurt performance; the trouble appeared only when anxiety was high too.
How this fits with other research
Edgin et al. (2017) saw a similar pattern in students with mild intellectual disability. Those teens also read neutral social cues more negatively when anxiety was high. Hide’s work extends the idea to general-education students.
Duker (1999) listed six key conversation behaviors for high-schoolers. Hide’s study now shows that safety behaviors can block those same six skills during real peer talk.
South et al. (2017) warned that anxiety can mimic ASD on rating scales. Hide adds detail: the mimicry may come from safety behaviors, not just anxiety scores.
Why it matters
If a teen with social anxiety keeps looking at the floor or giving one-word answers, the peer walks away and the anxiety grows. You can break that loop by teaching the student to drop the safety behavior and replace it with simple social responses. Start small: one eye contact plus one question per conversation. Track peer reciprocation as your direct measure.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Socially anxious adolescents often endure anxiety-provoking situations using safety behaviors: strategies for minimizing in-the-moment distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact, rehearsing statements before entering a conversation). Studies linking safety behaviors to impaired functioning have largely focused on adults. In a sample of one hundred thirty-four 14 to 15 year-old adolescents, we tested whether levels of safety behaviors among socially anxious adolescents relate to multiple domains of impaired functioning. Adolescents, parents, and research personnel completed survey measures of safety behaviors and social anxiety, adolescents and parents reported about adolescents' evaluative fears and psychosocial impairments, and adolescents participated in a set of tasks designed to simulate social interactions with same-age, unfamiliar peers. Relative to other adolescents in the sample, adolescents high on both safety behaviors and social anxiety displayed greater psychosocial impairments, evaluative fears, and observed social skills deficits within social interactions. These findings have important implications for assessing and treating adolescent social anxiety.
Behavior modification, 2022 · doi:10.1177/01454455211054019