Dynamics Between Affect and Social Acceptance as a Function of Social Anxiety: A Person-Specific Network Approach

Social acceptance and rejection are salient experiences, especially during adolescence. Acceptance and rejection relate to changes in positive and negative affect, although directionality of the relation remains unclear. The ability to regulate affect following social experiences may be part of the etiology of social anxiety disorder. With the importance of social cues in adolescence, as well as adolescence as a key window for the onset of social anxiety, we used daily diary data collected in a sample ranging from 9 to 18 years to examine daily changes in acceptance, rejection, positive affect, and negative affect. Taking a person-centered approach, we constructed networks directionally linking social experiences and affect, which served as behaviors of interest (“nodes”) in the network for each individual. From these networks, we extracted recovery times from different nodes, that is, the number of days it took for a node to return to baseline when (a) the node itself was perturbed and (b) when a connected node was perturbed. We examined associations between network metrics and social anxiety, age, gender, and their interaction. We found that the recovery time of positive affect when social acceptance was perturbed was inversely related with social anxiety and age, suggesting benefits of acceptance may be shorter lasting for those with more (vs. less) social anxiety symptoms and for older (vs. younger) adolescents. We conclude that positive affect may be a critical yet understudied piece in understanding why adolescence is a developmental period of increased risk for psychopathology and for understanding the etiology of social anxiety disorder.