Social Anxiety and Emotion Regulation in Daily Life: Spillover Effects on Positive and Negative Social Events
Open accessAbstract
To minimize the possibility of scrutiny, people with social anxiety difficulties exert great effort to manage their emotions, particularly during social interactions. We examined how the use of two emotion regulation strategies, emotion suppression and cognitive reappraisal, predict the generation of emotions and social events in daily life. Over 14 consecutive days, 89 participants completed daily diary entries on emotions, positive and negative social events, and their regulation of emotions. Using multilevel modeling, we found that when people high in social anxiety relied more on positive emotion suppression, they reported fewer positive social events and less positive emotion on the subsequent day. In contrast, people low in social anxiety reported fewer negative social events on days subsequent to using cognitive reappraisal to reduce distress; the use of cognitive reappraisal did not influence the daily lives of people high in social anxiety. Our findings support theories of emotion regulation difficulties associated with social anxiety. In particular, for people high in social anxiety, maladaptive strategy use contributed to diminished reward responsiveness.
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Farmer and Kashdan found that high social anxiety was related to positive emotion suppression, fewer positive social events, and fewer positive emotions on subsequent days.
“Farmer and Kashdan [61] implemented a 2-week diary, showing that high SA was related to positive emotion suppression, fewer positive social events, and fewer positive emotions on subsequent days.”
From Studies of Social Anxiety Using Ambulatory Assessment: Systematic Review (2024) · cites this paper as [61]
The Method describes a two-week daily diary, and the Discussion reports greater use of positive-emotion suppression among people high in social anxiety. The Results link suppression in that group to less positive emotion the next day, but the next-day reduction in positive social events was only marginal (p = .06). The claim omits that both next-day findings were conditional on suppressing positive emotion; social anxiety alone did not predict the average frequency of positive social events. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredOn days in which social anxiety symptoms increased, the use of suppression tended also to increase.
“on days in which SA symptoms increased, the use of suppression tended also to increase [61,69].”
From Studies of Social Anxiety Using Ambulatory Assessment: Systematic Review (2024) · cites this paper as [61]
The Results section (Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation Strategies; page unavailable) reports that people with higher social anxiety used more positive and negative emotion suppression. That supports an association, but the reported finding compares people; it does not establish that a given person used more suppression on days when their symptoms increased. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe lack of significance for positive affect contradicted many other ambulatory assessment studies that yielded significant between-person associations between lower levels of positive affect and higher levels of negative affect with social anxiety.
“This lack of significance contradicted many other AA studies that yielded significant between-person associations between lower levels of PA and higher levels of NA with SA [16,20,30,54,57,58,61,69,70].”
From Studies of Social Anxiety Using Ambulatory Assessment: Systematic Review (2024) · cites this paper as [61]
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References 63 · Cited by 192
- Authors
- Farmer, A. S., & Kashdan, T. B.
- Affiliations
- George Mason University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kashdan, Todd B.
- Venue
- Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2012-03-20
- Volume
- 41
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 152-162
- ISSN
- 1650-6073 (ISSN-L)
- 1651-2316
- PMC
- PMC3370054
- OpenAlex
- W2064936828
- Cited by
- 192
- References
- 63
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 18 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 14.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (F31DA029390)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Emotions and Moral Behavior
- Keywords
- social anxiety, emotion regulation, emotional suppression, cognitive reappraisal, spillover effects, positive emotions, everyday life, reward responsiveness, maladaptive emotion regulation
- MeSH terms
- Affect, Character, Defense Mechanisms, Female, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Judgment, Male, Personality Assessment, Phobic Disorders, Psychometrics, Reinforcement, Psychology, Social Adjustment, Social Environment, Social Perception, Students, Young Adult, Emotional Intelligence
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