(PS9-B36) Cultural Differences in Social Anxiety: The Role of Self-conscious Emotions

A number of research studies have found that self-reported social anxiety symptoms differ among people of varying cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Specifically, cross-cultural research has shown that East Asians and Asian Americans tend to report higher social anxiety symptoms compared to people of European heritage (for a meta-analysis, see Krieg & Xu, 2014). Given higher social anxiety symptoms reported by individuals of East Asian cultural heritage, there has been a growing attempt to understand factors and mechanisms that may help explain the group differences. However, few studies have paid attention to the roles of self-conscious emotions may play in explaining the cultural differences in social anxiety. Emotion theorists have suggested that self-conscious emotions such as shame and guilt, are often used to bring about reconciliation and to establish cooperative social relations, and cross-cultural studies have shown that individuals of Asian heritage tend to report stronger self-conscious emotions than their European American counterparts, possibly due to a strong emphasis on an interdependent self-construal. It seems likely that a strong cultural emphasis on and propensity to experience self-conscious emotions, such as guilt and shame, may be partly responsible for higher social anxiety symptoms reported by Asian Americans than European Americans. Therefore, the current study explored the differences in social anxiety and propensity to experience guilt and shame in European American and Asian American college students.

A total of 238 participants, including 144 Asian American and 94 European American college students, completed the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) and the Guilt and Shame Proneness Scale (GASP). Participants were 65.5% female and had a mean age of 20.03 years (SD = 2.88). Both the SIAS (α = 0.86) and GASP (α = 0.82) showed good internal consistency in this sample.

Results from an independent samples T-test indicated that there was a significant difference in social anxiety (t[225] = -3.39, p = 0.001), such that Asian Americans reported higher ratings (M = 8.95, SD = 5.52) than European Americans (M = 6.50, SD = 5.02). Further independent samples T-tests indicated that there were significant group differences in proneness to experiencing guilt regarding negative social evaluation (t[225] = -2.13, p < 0.05) and shame (t[225] = -1.98, p < 0.05). There was no significant group difference in proneness to experiencing guilt leading to behavior change. A multiple regression analysis was run to predict social interaction anxiety ratings from proneness to experience guilt and shame. Results showed that proneness to experience shame was a significant predictor (F[2, 219] = 7.698, p = .001), while proneness to experience guilt was not (p = .434). Results from this study suggest that Asian Americans tend to experience higher social anxiety and are more prone to feeling shame and guilt in situations leading to negative social evaluation compared with European Americans. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the differences in propensity to feel shame may be associated with individuals’ self-reported social anxiety.