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    Keeping Others at Arm’s Length: Examining the Contribution of Fears of Receiving Compassion to Safety Behaviour Use and Positivity Deficits in Social Anxiety
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-07-08) Ho, Jolie Tsoi Kan
    For many people, social relationships are a source of valued support, closeness, and positivity, motivating them to seek out and repeatedly enter social situations to fulfill their fundamental need for social connection (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995). However, despite yearning for social connection, individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) struggle to capitalize on social opportunities to foster interpersonal closeness, and experience “positivity deficits” that are reflected in their failure to benefit emotionally from social contexts that others find rewarding (Kashdan, 2004; Kashdan, 2011). Rather than viewing social encounters as pleasurable, they may tend to appraise potentially rewarding social contexts as threatening due to intense fears of publicly exposing their self-perceived flaws and inviting judgment and criticism from others (Moscovitch, 2009). While self-portrayal fears have been shown to drive the use of maladaptive safety behaviours in individuals with SAD (Moscovitch et al., 2013), whether and how they may also contribute to positivity deficits remains unclear. Alongside self-portrayal fears, emerging research suggests that people with SAD also experience elevated fears of receiving compassion from others, eliciting feelings of threat or unfamiliarity when others offer support in the form of kindness, warmth, and affection (Gilbert et al., 2011; Merritt & Purdon, 2020). Like self-portrayal concerns, fears of receiving compassion may function to keep others at arm’s length, which may contribute in important ways to safety behaviour use and positivity deficits in SAD. However, the nature of the relationship between fears of receiving compassion, on one hand, and safety behaviour use and positivity deficits, on the other, has not yet been empirically examined. Furthermore, whether deficits in different subtypes of positivity (i.e., activated positive affect vs. soothing/ safe positive affect) exist amongst socially anxious individuals and their predictors remain unknown. To address these critical gaps in the literature, my doctoral dissertation presents a series of three novel, methodologically diverse studies to help us gain new insights into the role of fears of receiving compassion in the behavioural and emotional experiences of individuals with symptoms of social anxiety across social contexts. First, I present the results of a cross-sectional, correlational study in which I analyzed the role of fears of receiving compassion on safety behaviour use in participants with SAD, over and above the well-established contribution of fears of negative self-portrayal (Study 1). Next, I extend these findings to investigate immediate emotional and cognitive responses in the moment of receiving compassion from others: in Study 2, I present results from an online study using an experimental written vignette paradigm to examine the effects of trait social anxiety symptoms, fears of negative self-portrayal, and fears of receiving compassion on responses to imagined compassionate feedback after an imagined shame-based social scenario (i.e., being socially rejected or committing a social blunder). Finally, to replicate and extend these findings to naturalistic social contexts, I employed ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via a smartphone app to examine how momentary safety behaviour use in naturalistic social situations impacts different types of momentary positive affect (i.e., activated positive affect vs. soothing/ safe positive affect), and how relations between momentary safety behaviour use and momentary affect across time are moderated by fears of negative self-portrayal and fears of receiving compassion (Study 3). Primary findings across the three studies demonstrated, first, that trait fears of receiving compassion predicted trait safety behaviour use over and above trait fears of negative self-portrayal. Second, trait fears of receiving compassion also influenced immediate, momentary emotional and cognitive responses to imagining receiving expressions of compassion from others after a socially distressing event. Third, momentary levels of both fears of receiving compassion and negative self-portrayal predicted increased safety behaviour use in naturalistic social interactions, which then predicted increased negative affect and decreased feelings of social safeness. Theoretical and clinical implications of the program of research are discussed, including the role of compassion fears in the conceptualization of safety behaviour use in social anxiety, considerations for improving therapeutic procedures of safety behaviour reduction in CBT protocols, and the importance of targeting specific types of positive affect deficits in treatment of SAD, with an emphasis on devoting special therapeutic attention to social safeness enhancement. I conclude by identifying key questions for future research.
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    Multiple Motivations Underlying Children’s Affiliative Behaviour: The Functional Role of Affiliative Language
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-07-08) English, Sarah
    Social connection is one of the most fundamental human needs, shaping behaviour across the entire lifespan. As children develop, language becomes an increasingly central means through which they express their desire to connect with others – their social motivations. Yet relatively little is known about how and why children use language to signal their social motivation, or what individual and contextual factors shape its use. The three studies presented in this dissertation address these gaps by introducing a validated measure of children’s affiliative language use, examining how trait-level individual differences shape communicative patterns across the early stages of a developing peer relationship, and directly testing how experiences of social exclusion influence affiliative language use and the affective processes that may underlie it. Chapter 2 introduces and validates the Child Affiliative Language (CAL) dictionary – a novel, LIWC-based tool for quantifying children’s affiliative language use during naturalistic peer interactions. Affiliative language, as captured by the CAL dictionary, was meaningfully distinct from general talkativeness and broader linguistic ability, but was associated with positive social outcomes including greater peer-reported liking, higher observer-rated social engagement, and increased prosocial sharing. Children also used significantly more affiliative language during an unstructured get-to-know-you task than during a goal-oriented brainstorming task, consistent with the interpretation that the measure captures shifts in social motivation across contexts rather than stable individual differences in communicative style. Chapter 3 uses a longitudinal dyadic approach to examine how temperamental shyness shapes children’s verbal communication across three sessions with the same previously unfamiliar peer. Despite speaking less than their less shy peers, shy children used a greater proportion of affiliative language during their initial interaction, suggesting that when shy children do speak, they are more likely to do so in ways that signal warmth and the desire to connect. Verbal reticence also longitudinally mediated the association between shyness and outside observers’ ratings of social engagement; yet shy children were liked just as much by their own interaction partners, highlighting a meaningful discrepancy between how children’s peer relationships appear to outside observers and how those relationships are experienced. Chapter 4 uses an experimental paradigm to examine how experiences of social exclusion shape affiliative language use in children and adolescents. Excluded youth spoke significantly less than those in the inclusion condition during a subsequent social interaction. Contrary to expectations, social exclusion did not directly predict greater affiliative language use. Age was also unexpectedly negatively associated with affiliative language use, such that older adolescents used less affiliative language than younger children across conditions. Importantly, individual differences in perceived physiological reactivity to the exclusion task uniquely predicted greater affiliative language use, suggesting that it may be the subjective affective experience of social stress, rather than the objective experience of exclusion itself, that shapes how youth use language to signal their social motivations. Together, these findings suggest that affiliative language is a sensitive, dynamic index of children’s social motivation – one shaped by both stable individual differences and the social situations that children find themselves in. The results further suggest that affiliative language may serve not only an interpersonal function, but an intrapersonal, regulatory function as well. These studies lay the groundwork for a broader program of research into the motivated, context-sensitive, and multiply determined nature of children’s social communication, and offers a new lens through which children’s social development can be understood and supported.
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    Estimating dynamic spillover effects along multiple networks in a linear panel model
    (University of Waterloo, 2022-11-17) Possnig, Clemens; Rotarescu, Andreea; Song, Kyungchul
    Spillover of economic outcomes often arises over multiple networks, and distinguishing their separate roles is important in empirical research. For example, the direction of spillover between two groups (such as banks and industrial sectors linked in a bipartite graph) has important economic implications, and a researcher may want to learn which direction is supported in the data. For this, we need to have an empirical methodology that allows for both directions of spillover simultaneously. In this paper, we develop a dynamic linear panel model and asymptotic inference with large n and small T, where both directions of spillover are accommodated through multiple networks. Using the methodology developed here, we perform an empirical study of spillovers between bank weakness and zombie-firm congestion in industrial sectors, using firm-bank matched data from Spain between 2005 and 2012. Overall, we find that there is positive spillover in both directions between banks and sectors.
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    Descriptive labour market outcomes of immigrant women across Europe
    (University of Waterloo, 2022) Adsera, Alicia; Ferrer, Ana; Herranz, Virginia
    We consider the job progression of immigrant women in five European countries: France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK. We complement data from the European Labour Force Survey (2005-2015), with information about the skills contained in the jobs held on by women, using data from the O*Net. In particular, we focus on analytical and strength skills in immigrant's jobs and compare them to those required by jobs held by similar native women. Even though immigrants experience upon arrival a gap in participation relative to the native born, they gradually increase participation during the first ten years spent in the country (approximately, 1% per year in Spain, Italy and the UK, and 2% and 4% per year in France and Sweden respectively). Our results reveal significant differences across countries of origin as well as differences within countries over the period of analysis. Recent immigrant women show relatively large gaps in the analytical skill content of the jobs they held relative to native-born women across our host countries. Further, with the exception of immigrants to pain, they also work jobs with higher requirements of strength than their native-born counterparts do. Although educated immigrants show a different pattern in most countries (included Spain). We find differences within countries over the period of analysis that may be consistent with the variation of incentives to move depending on the business cycle at arrival - particularly given the meager opportunities in many destination countries during aftermath of the recent great recession.
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    Immigrant gaps in parental time investments into children's human capital activities
    (University of Waterloo, 2022) Ferrer, Ana; Mascella, Allison
    Current and future well-being and economic prosperity of children depend in large part on the nuances of decisions made by parents with respect to familial resources, an important part of which regard the time spent in the company of children. We estimate differences in the time that immigrant and Canadian-born parents allocate to child-care activities relative to other activities using the time diaries from the General Social Survey. We find that mothers born abroad spend more time at work and less time in leisure but there is no significant difference in time devoted to household production or child service between them and Canadian-born mothers. Despite not finding differences by immigration status in the total care-time parents provide for their children, we do find significant differences - by immigrant status - in time specifically devoted to human capital investment activities with children: African, Asian, European and South-Central American mothers spend up to 30 more minutes daily in these activities than the Canadian born. We further assess the patterns of time use of second-generation young adults and find that they spend more time on education and homework compared to third generation or higher young adults. This supports a plausible effect of the time invested in children's human capital generating activities by immigrant parents on their Canadian-born children.