How Badly Will I Feel if You Don't Like Me? Social Anxiety and Predictions of Future Affect

The current study investigated whether high and low socially anxious individuals would show differences in affective forecasting accuracy (i.e., the prediction of emotional states in response to future events) to positive versus negative social evaluation. High ( n =94) and low ( n =98) socially anxious participants gave a speech and were randomly assigned to receive a positive or negative evaluation. For affective forecasts made proximally (moments before the speech), those low in social anxiety overpredicted their affect to a greater extent to a negative evaluation versus a positive evaluation. In contrast, those high in social anxiety overpredicted their affect to positive and negative evaluations comparably, and failed to adjust their prediction for a future hypothetical negative evaluation - in effect, not learning from their prior forecasting error. Results suggest that affective forecasting biases deserve further study as a maintaining factor for social anxiety symptoms.