B4729 - Social Anxiety and Peer Victimization in Early Adolescence - 28/10/2024
As many as one in three adolescents struggle with social anxiety. Social anxiety on its own can be debilitating for youth; it also increases risk for later social isolation, loneliness, depression, and substance abuse. Due to social anxiety’s high prevalence and association with multiple negative downstream outcomes, prevention of its development could profoundly improve wellbeing among young people. Effective prevention will depend on a clear characterization of trajectories along which social anxiety develops across the transition to adolescence that lead to better or worse outcomes.
Distinct trajectories of social anxiety symptom development reflect varying dynamic interactions between early social experiences and individual characteristics of biological and cognitive vulnerability. Describing these trajectories can shed light on indicators of the likelihood that social anxiety will be impairing and will reveal points for preventive interventions to disrupt its development. This proposal focuses specifically on the dynamics of social anxiety symptoms and peer victimization over time. Peer victimization in school is a common social stressor that can have long term negative impacts on mental health and social adjustment, and social anxiety has been identified as both a risk for and consequence of peer victimization.
The primary hypothesis of this proposal is that there is heterogeneity in subpopulations of children based on the interplay of their social anxiety symptoms and peer victimization, and that these subpopulations are characterized by unique profiles of environmental, motivational and biological risk and protective factors. This proposal represents a first step toward understanding the biosocial ecological contexts in which social anxiety develops and that effective prevention efforts need to consider.