In plain language
Experiential avoidance is the habit of trying to escape or control unwanted inner experiences — distressing emotions, negative thoughts, uncomfortable sensations. Pushing feelings away often brings temporary relief, but used rigidly it tends to increase the very distress a person is trying to avoid, and it is thought to be a key risk factor for social anxiety. Most prior research, however, measured experiential avoidance as a fixed personality trait, ignoring the situations in which it actually operates. This paper took the process into the real world.
In the first study, 37 adults with Social Anxiety Disorder and 38 healthy controls kept two weeks of diaries about their face-to-face social interactions, reporting how much they avoided their feelings and how anxious they were in each encounter. Moment-to-moment experiential avoidance went hand in hand with anxiety symptoms during interactions, and this effect was stronger in people with Social Anxiety Disorder. Interestingly, people low in avoidance were more sensitive to how threatening a situation actually was — their anxiety tracked the situation — whereas high avoiders tended to be anxious regardless.
In the second study, strangers were paired for a conversation that either invited closeness (escalating self-disclosure) or did not (small talk). Avoiding feelings during the self-disclosure conversation preceded rising social anxiety across the rest of the interaction; in the small-talk conversation, avoidance had no such effect. Together the studies show the cost of avoiding your own feelings depends on context: it is most damaging precisely in the situations that offer social threat — and social opportunity, such as the chance to build intimacy.
Key findings
- Across two weeks of daily diaries, momentary experiential avoidance was positively related to anxiety symptoms during face-to-face social interactions.
- The link between experiential avoidance and social anxiety was stronger among people diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder than among healthy controls.
- People low in experiential avoidance showed greater sensitivity to the level of situational threat, whereas high avoiders' anxiety was less tied to the actual situation.
- In a laboratory encounter between strangers, greater experiential avoidance during a self-disclosure conversation temporally preceded increases in social anxiety for the remainder of the interaction.
- No such effect of experiential avoidance emerged in the small-talk conversation, showing the harm of avoidance depends on the degree of social threat and opportunity for intimacy.
- The findings support a contextual view of experiential avoidance, moving beyond trait measures to real-world and experimentally created social situations.
How to cite
APA
Kashdan, T. B., Goodman, F. R., Machell, K. A., Kleiman, E. M., Monfort, S. S., Ciarrochi, J., & Nezlek, J. B. (2014). A contextual approach to experiential avoidance and social anxiety: Evidence from an experimental interaction and daily interactions of people with social anxiety disorder. Emotion, 14(4), 769–781. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035935
BibTeX
@article{kashdan2014contextual,
title = {A contextual approach to experiential avoidance and social anxiety: Evidence from an experimental interaction and daily interactions of people with social anxiety disorder},
author = {Kashdan, Todd B. and Goodman, Fallon R. and Machell, Kyla A. and Kleiman, Evan M. and Monfort, Samuel S. and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Nezlek, John B.},
journal = {Emotion},
volume = {14},
number = {4},
pages = {769--781},
year = {2014},
doi = {10.1037/a0035935}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
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Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.