The Effect of Social Anxiety on the Effectiveness of Emotional Expression Techniques
Kana Mizuno (AY 2013)
Social anxiety (SA) is "anxiety experienced when expressing oneself or engaging in activities in front of others" (Matsunari and Harizuka, 2003), and people with SA often avoid social situations that create tension or anxiety and tend to participate minimally in conversations (Leary et al.).Much research has been conducted on the expressive and interpretive characteristics of people with SA (Philippot and Douilliez, 2005; Koizumi et al., 2011). However, it is still unclear whether current methods of expression actually convey the speaker's message to the listener, and how people with SA perceive these methods of expression. It is also unclear whether people with SA have the ability to use these modes of expression. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to clarify the actual situation of people with SA in terms of their awareness and ability to use expressive techniques, focusing on the communication of emotions.
Based on previous research, we prepared six expressive techniques and conducted an experiment with subjects to investigate their awareness and ability to use each expressive technique. The experiment was conducted in three sessions, the first of which consisted of a questionnaire on the recognition of each expressive technique. In the first session, participants were asked to express their emotions by reading a story that expressed three types of emotions: Positive, Sad, and Angry. In the second session, we explained the practice of the expression techniques in daily life and asked the participants to practice the techniques for one week when communicating their emotions. In the third session, a questionnaire was used to examine changes in participants' perceptions and SA of the expressive techniques over the course of the practice period. The participants in this experiment were 16 female students at the University of Tsukuba.
The results of the experiment showed that the strength of the emotion conveyed tended to increase when the expression technique of "increasing the number of words uttered with the expression of positive emotion" was intentionally used, while the strength of the emotion conveyed tended to decrease when the expression technique of "decreasing the number of words uttered with the expression of sad emotion" was intentionally used. In addition, the high SA group tended to show a stronger relationship between awareness of the use of expression techniques and the degree of increase in the strength of emotion conveyed than the low SA group in terms of awareness of expression techniques. These results suggest that although there is no marked difference in the ability to practice expressive techniques between the high and low SA groups, the degree of increase in the high SA group is more influenced by their awareness of the use of expressive techniques than that of the low SA group. Therefore, when supporting emotional expression, it is more effective to suggest expressive techniques that the high SA group is more aware of using. Although there was no significant trend in the relationship between the expressive techniques practiced and changes in SA in this experiment, there was a lot of positive feedback such as "I had the opportunity to review my own emotional expressions" and "I became aware of more concrete and easier to understand expressions" after participating in the experiment.
There were some problems in this experiment, such as the strong restriction of emotional expressions and the small and biased number of subjects to be studied. Therefore, we believe that in the future, increasing the number of expression methods and survey targets and investigating the relationship between the practice of expression methods and changes in SA in a less restrictive environment will clarify effective expression methods for reducing SA.
(Translated by DeepL)