Social anxiety is condition that has been described since the days of Hippocrates. Hippocrates described an individual who would avoid social outings due to being timid, bashful, and fear of being misused, disgraced, make a fool of himself, or being sick and believes he is constantly being watched. Will the man who suffers from social anxiety react differently to mistakes based on social context? A study by Barker, Troller-Renfree, Pine, & Fox in 2015 attempted to test that. Baker et al. tried to measure the error-related negativity, an event potential that occurs 50 ms after the faulty response. The purpose of the study was to see if there is a relationship between the magnitude of the ERN and social anxiety.
Barker et al. used two groups of individuals. The first group was a group that hardly exhibit social anxiety and the second group was a group that exhibited high levels of social anxiety. The first group has 10 males and 11 females and the second group had 11 males and 11 females. The individuals were selected by using the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. Participants in the study also completed the Penn State Worry Questionnaire and the Beck Depression Inventory. The reason why Barker et al. selected the PSWQ is because it has shown high internal reliability in clinical and normative populations and has demonstrated the ability to be able to distinguish between the constructs of worry, anxiety, and depression. The BDI was selected because it has shown the ability to assess symptoms of depression in normative samples.
After the participants were selected they were seated to gender matched partners and briefed about the study. They then filled out questionnaires. The Partners were undergrad students posing as participants. The experiment involved two stages of testing. The first stage was the alone stage where the confederate was taken into a different room and the participant played a computer game. The second stage was the peer stage, the participant and the confederate drew numbers to see who would get to be the observer and who would play the game. For the alone stage the participant was led to believe the confederate was playing the same game. For the peer stage the observer was directed to sit at a 90-degree angle from the participant while observing the participant while taking note of the times the participant made an error. The participant was given a handheld button box. The participants were told to press the left button when the arrow was pointing towards the left and press the right button when the arrow points to the right and to respond as quickly and accurately as possible. The test involved a practice block of 30 trials and 8 blocks of 52 trials and two participants, one from the high social anxiety group and one from the low social anxiety group, had 8 blocks of 48 trials.
The goal of the study according to Barker et al. was to examine error-related activity in people that have social anxiety and whether individuals with high levels of social anxiety experience greater enhancement of the ERN in an environment where they are being observed compared to when they are alone. While the study was successful and did prove a link between the magnitude of the ERN and social anxiety, the study does leave a few important questions. How can this be used in order to help individuals that are plagued with severe social anxiety? Were any of the participants actually diagnosed with SAD? Can the data based off of forty people be generalized?
Because the ERN is observable with an EEG and because it is closely associated with levels of social anxiety perhaps it could be used to help intervene in children that have a higher risk of developing anxiety disorders. In an article written by Olven and Hajcak in 2008, ERN has been shown to be a candidate biological endophenotype and might lead to anxiety disorders. So is early intervention as easy as throwing an EEG on a child and observing how they react to errors? There is little research on the matter whether differences in temperament actually do affect the ERN