Does social anxiety alter social cognition?

Researchers who study social cognition frequently study clinical groups with well established social cognitive impairments such as as individuals with autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. For this reason, the more subtle social cognitive disturbances that are characteristic of individuals with higher levels of anxiety and depression often get overlooked.

How do we measure social effort?

In a recent paper, in collaboration with the the Boston University AMP Lab, we also created a new measure of social effort. See the preprint of our recent publication here.

Over the past several years, we have been systematically examining associations between social anxiety, depression, and behaviorally assessed social cognitive ability. To date, we’ve found a negative association between social anxiety and higher-level social cognitive ability for cognitive empathic processes.

Publications involving social cognition and psychopathology

Alvi, T., Rosenfield, D., Sunahara, C. S., Wallmark, Z., Lee, J., & Tabak, B. A. (in press). Examining unique associations of social anxiety and depression on behaviorally assessed affective empathy. Clinical Psychological Science.

Alvi, T., Kumar, D., & Tabak, B. A. (2022). Social anxiety and behavioral assessments of social cognition: A systematic review. Journal of Affective Disorders, 311, 17-30.

Abplanalp, S. J., Mote, J., Uhlman, A. C., Weizenbaum, E., Alvi, T., Tabak, B. A., & Fulford, D.  (in press). Parsing social motivation: Development and validation of a self-report measure of social effort. Journal of Mental Health. PREPRINT.

Alvi, T., Kouros, C. D., Lee, J., Fulford, D., & Tabak, B. A. (2020). Social anxiety is negatively associated with theory of mind and empathic accuracy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 129, 108-113.

Young, K. S., Parsons, C., LeBeau, R. T., Tabak, B. A., Sewart, A., Stein, A. S., Kringelbach, M. L., & Craske, M. G. (2017). Sensing emotion in voices: negativity bias and gender differences in a validation study of the Oxford Vocal ('OxVoc') Sounds Database. Psychological Assessment, 29, 967-977.