Keeping Others at Arm’s Length: Examining the Contribution of Fears of Receiving Compassion to Safety Behaviour Use and Positivity Deficits in Social Anxiety

Abstract

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.