Social Anxiety as an Early Warning System: A Refinement and Extension of the Self-Presentation Theory of Social Anxiety
Although several explanations of social anxiety exist, most of them emphasize one of three sets of antecedents: biological mechanisms involving temperamental, genetic, psychophysiological, and evolutionary factors; cognitive patterns in how people think about themselves and their social worlds; and interpersonal processes that occur in the context of social interaction. The approach of this chapter is decidedly social psychological in that it traces social anxiety to concerns that arise in the context of real, anticipated, and imagined interpersonal interactions. The chapter describes a refinement and extension of the self-presentational theory of social anxiety, a perspective that explains people's nervousness in social encounters in terms of their concerns about other people's perceptions of them. Although the self-presentation theory has fared well under the spotlight of empirical research, theoretical developments shed additional light on the self-presentational nature of social anxiety and provide a bridge by which one's understanding of social anxiety may be linked to other phenomena involving interpersonal motives, social emotions, and the self. These theoretical refinements do not contradict or refute self-presentation theory but rather take it to a deeper level, demonstrating precisely why it is that people worry so much about what other people think of them. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
