The social self

Abstract

Abstract Intuitively and clinically, people with social anxiety disorder (SAD) fear social interaction because they overestimate the adversity of the social world. They retreat from a world that they misrepresent as hostile and intractable. However, SAD is not essentially a problem of misrepresentation of the social world. Rather inconsistent and fragile self modelling leads to misrepresentation of the social world. The SAD subject represents the social world as essential to her well-being because she lacks confidence in her capacity for independent coping. However, simultaneously, she predicts that engaging with others will lead to humiliation and ostracism. A weak and unstable avatar that leads to conflicting social motivation manifests as SAD symptoms and makes it impossible for her to adaptively regulate or reinterpret her distressing experience.