Exploring social anxiety in digital platforms within novel experimental laboratory paradigms

Abstract

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a prevalent and persistent condition that has a significant impact on an individual's quality of life. It is important to understand the mechanisms that contribute to the development of SAD, in order to develop more effective and evidence-based treatments. The central objective of this thesis is to develop experimental paradigms that can simulate social anxiety in online and virtual platforms in human participants, and to test their potential in understanding the underlying mechanisms of SAD. The thesis first provides an overview of the nature and prevalence of social anxiety and reviews the literature on changes in social anxiety diagnostic criteria. It then critically evaluates influential social anxiety theories alongside empirical evidence. Subsequently, it investigates the experimental human models of anxiety induced by both psychological and biological challenges. Lastly, the thesis discusses the role of technology in social anxiety research, particularly focusing on virtual and online platforms, and presents three empirical studies. The first study examines the combination of a socially evaluative public speaking task in virtual reality (VR) and CO₂ gas mixture as a potential paradigm for inducing anxiety in healthy individuals, with a focus on its relevance to cognitive mechanisms of SAD. The findings revealed that the augmentation of the CO₂ gas and a virtual public speaking task resulted in heightened subjective and objective arousal. In addition, participants who performed within this augmentation had more severe anticipatory processing (measured retrospectively) and underestimated their performance. The second study investigates the anxiogenic effects of a photorealistic 360-degree public speaking VR scenario as a potential laboratory human model of anxiety, and its relevance to trait and situational social anxiety. Further, this study explores the potential habituation effects that might occur as a result of performing in the virtual task, within a subsequent real-life socially evaluative scenario (calculation task). We found meaningful effects that this paradigm can induce situational social anxiety. We also discovered some trends on the relevance of our paradigm to trait social anxiety. The final study explores how the camera features of online communication platforms support the validity of social anxiety theories, which have gained popularity, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The findings provided evidence that our online protocol could be utilised as an anxiogenic paradigm. Furthermore, our findings revealed that when participants performed in front of an audience with audience images/videos turned off, but with their own self-depicting video on, they rated their performance more poorly and engaged in more frequent post-event processing. These results provide additional support for the validity of existing theories regarding social anxiety in online communication platforms. Overall, the thesis contributes to a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in SAD in virtual and online socially evaluative paradigms and can provide valuable insights for developing effective treatment approaches.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Neslihan Ozhan: orcid.org/0000-0001-8648-2458

ORCID for Erich Graf: orcid.org/0000-0002-3162-4233

ORCID for Matthew Garner: orcid.org/0000-0001-9481-2226

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