Social interaction is filled with ambiguous cues. Is that person across the bar checking me out, or am I imagining things? Does a smile mean eagerness to chat, or nervous deflection? Am I talking too much? Am I a boring person?
Getting too wrapped up in trying to read social signals can be exhausting, even under the best conditions. But a new study underscores that it’s especially difficult for people with social anxiety disorder (SAD). They come into every social experience—from a cocktail party to a watercooler chat—hyper-aware that they’re being subtly judged. And while a lot of signals in social situations are ambiguous, people with SAD tend to read those signals negatively—as proof of their worst-case scenarios.
Most research into SAD has focused on ambiguous verbal cues—times when words can convey a spectrum of meaning. As expected, people with SAD often read that ambiguity negatively, as criticism or rejection. But a new study set out to see if that was true of nonverbal communication as well; specifically, researchers wanted to see how people with SAD read facial cues.
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They used an intriguing method, using a video in which the facial expression slowly changed from pleasure (smiling) to disgust. Participants stopped the video as soon as they saw the change. (A control group watched a video with no change in expression.) The researchers also used a video that changed from disgust to pleasure. Before watching the video, participants played a rigged game designed to produce feelings of inclusion or ostracism—researchers wanted to see whether feeling “left out” primed them to read facial cues differently.
It turned out that people who’d rated themselves high in social anxiety did perceive a smile turning to disgust quicker. But it wasn’t just that they were more primed to detect any change in facial cues: When the process was run in reverse, they weren’t quicker to see disgust turning to pleasure. In other words, they were more primed to see good cues turn bad, but not the reverse.
While the findings aren’t definitive—science rarely is—it does suggest some good advice for the socially anxious, which might be all of us at one time or another. It’s relatively simple: Don’t jump to conclusions. Rather than immediately reading ambiguous cues as negative, take a mental step back and wait for more information. Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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