Reading focus
Syllabus: When Do Fear and Worry Become Persistent Problems?
Track the proposed comparison between the perceived self and presumed audience expectations.
Why you’re reading it. Extend the appraisal question beyond bodily sensations to social evaluation.
A question to consider. What combination of self-ratings, observer ratings, and information about actual audience behavior would distinguish a distorted appraisal from a consequential social threat?
Why this reading
Rapee and Heimberg explain social anxiety through a person’s representation of how they appear to an audience and what that audience expects. The model links attention, appraisal, and bodily reactions in a feedback process that generates testable questions.
Before you read
“Social phobia” is the paper’s historical diagnostic term. A mental representation of oneself as seen by others is an inference, not direct access to their judgments. Perceived standards and perceived performance are separate parts of the proposed comparison.
Read for
- Follow how internal sensations and external cues contribute to the representation of the self. Which parts of the loop are assumptions?
- Ask whether high anxiety requires unusually high audience standards, or can follow from a perceived gap between performance and expectations.
Consider afterwards
- A speaker judges their performance harshly while independent observers rate it favorably. Which part of the model does this contrast address, and which parts remain untested?
Editorial context
This is a theoretical integration, not an experiment validating each arrow. Its scope concerns anxious social evaluation; ordinary shyness is not by itself a disorder. Actual hostility, discrimination, or consequential evaluation must also be considered when judging a threat appraisal. A proposed feedback loop requires evidence about temporal order and alternatives, not merely correlations among its components.