Social anxiety and social performance: why don't we see more catastrophes?

E Y Strahan1, A J Conger

  • 1Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.

Journal of Anxiety Disorders
|September 30, 1999
PubMed

Related Concept Videos

Social Anxiety Disorder01:28

Social Anxiety Disorder

Social anxiety disorder, also known as social phobia, is characterized by an intense fear of social situations where one might face humiliation, rejection, embarrassment, or negative evaluation. This disorder leads individuals to avoid activities like casual conversations, public speaking, or seemingly simple tasks such as eating, signing documents, or swimming, in public settings. Its impact extends beyond discomfort, often significantly interfering with daily functioning and quality of life.
Social Facilitation01:04

Social Facilitation

Not all intergroup interactions lead to negative outcomes. Sometimes, being in a group situation can improve performance. Social facilitation occurs when an individual performs better when an audience is watching than when the individual performs the behavior alone. This typically occurs when people are performing a task for which they are skilled.
Self-Presentation: Self-Monitoring and Self-Handicapping02:05

Self-Presentation: Self-Monitoring and Self-Handicapping

People can go to great lengths to protect their self-image and present themselves in ways that they want others to see them. Sociologist Erving Goffman presented the idea that a person is like an actor on a stage. Calling his theory dramaturgy, Goffman believed that we use “impression management” to present ourselves to others as we hope to be perceived. Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different roles depending on who is present (Goffman, 1959). Think about the way you...
Bystander Effect02:09

Bystander Effect

The discussion of bullying highlights the problem of witnesses not intervening to help a victim. This is a common occurrence, as the following well-publicized event demonstrates. In 1964, in Queens, New York, a 19-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese was attacked by a person with a knife near the back entrance to her apartment building and again in the hallway inside her apartment building. When the attack occurred, she screamed for help numerous times and eventually died from her stab wounds.
Fundamental Attribution Error01:14

Fundamental Attribution Error

According to some social psychologists, people tend to overemphasize internal factors as explanations—or attributions—for the behavior of other people. They tend to assume that the behavior of another person is a trait of that person, and to underestimate the power of the situation on the behavior of others. They tend to fail to recognize when the behavior of another is due to situational variables, and thus to the person’s state. This erroneous assumption is called the fundamental attribution...
Preparedness and Phobias01:09

Preparedness and Phobias

Human fear responses to certain stimuli, such as darkness, heights, deep water, and blood, can often arise despite the absence of direct negative experiences. This phenomenon is rooted in evolutionary psychology, which posits that humans have developed a predisposition to fear stimuli that historically posed significant survival threats. This predisposition, known as preparedness, suggests that early humans who developed a fear of potentially dangerous entities, such as venomous snakes and...