Does evaluating oneself cause evaluations of others while observing a social interaction? An experimental investigation of the cognitive and emotional consequences following a false-feedback task

Abstract

Introduction

Despite decades of research on how people with social anxiety evaluate themselves and others, it remains unclear whether people who evaluate themselves negatively also evaluate others negatively. Findings from other-evaluation research are equivocal, perhaps attributable to methodology differences and inconsistent operationalization. Social-cognitive and cognitive-behavioural models suggest that negative self-evaluations may cause participants to subsequently evaluate a visibly anxious person negatively. We tested this hypothesis experimentally, using a video-recorded social interaction and novel false-feedback manipulation.

Methods: 169 unselected participants completed baseline questionnaires and a 10-min impromptu conversation task with a confederate. We randomly assigned participants to receive positive, ambiguous, or negative false-feedback about their performance. Next, they evaluated their own performance and watched a recorded conversation between an anxious and confident speaker. Finally, they evaluated the anxious person’s performance.

Results: Our manipulation was effective; participants in the negative-feedback condition rated themselves more negatively. However, no differences emerged between conditions on most cognitive and emotional outcomes.

Discussion: Evaluating oneself negatively, on its own, may not lead people to evaluate a visibly anxious person in a recorded social interaction negatively in a single-session experiment within an unselected sample. Future studies should examine this relationship with a clinical sample across time and contexts.

Keywords

Social anxiety evaluations cognitive bias social projection theory

Introduction

A core feature of social anxiety is experiencing fear of negative evaluation, which contributes to increased self-presentation concerns and negative perceptions about one’s own performance (e.g. Schlenker & Leary, 1982; Stopa & Clark, 1993). People who experience fear and anxiety in social or performance situations (e.g. giving speeches or presentations, performing in front of others, being assertive; Brown & Barlow, 2014) may be especially self-evaluative when it comes to their own performance in these situations. Social anxiety is a relatively common experience, as over 60% of Canadians report feeling anxious in at least one social or performance situation in their lifetime (Stein et al., 1994). Whereas researchers have focused on how people with social anxiety think about themselves in anxiety-provoking social situations, far less attention has been paid to how they think about other anxious people. It is vital to understand how people with social fears interact with the world around them, especially given the interpersonal costs associated with having these types of fears (Alden, 2005). Therefore, we reviewed both social psychology and clinical psychology literature to inform our study hypotheses. Social projection theory is the process where people believe others are more similar than different from themselves (e.g. self: I’ll look awkward when I fumble over my words; others: they looked awkward when they fumbled over their words; Baumeister & Vohs, 2007). Understanding whether people evaluate other visibly anxious people negatively because they evaluate themselves negatively may have important implications for improving people’s interpersonal functioning.

People who experience social fears are often concerned they will be criticized, judged, or otherwise negatively evaluated, even when they rarely experience overtly negative evaluations. Research on cognitive biases has examined how people with elevated social anxiety symptoms interpret social or performance situations; people with social anxiety, compared to those without, interpret ambiguous social situations as negative, and negative social situations as catastrophic (Amir et al., 1998; Beard & Amir, 2010; Chen et al., 2019; Stopa & Clark, 2000). Much of the available research in this area has focused on people with social anxiety disorder (SAD). Because we want to understand self- and other-evaluations among people with a continuum of social anxiety experiences; we will review this important literature with these limitations (i.e. emphasis of clinical research, less understanding of how this could impact people with a range of symptoms) in mind. Nevertheless, some cognitive biases and anxiety-related emotional reactions that are often characteristic of those with SAD have been observed in subclinical samples (i.e. Crişan et al., 2016). Although interpretation biases appear to cause several cognitive, emotional, and behavioural consequences, we do not yet know if they also lead people to evaluate other anxious people negatively. Experimental research testing whether negative self-evaluations, on their own, cause negative other-evaluations among people with a range of social anxiety levels is vital in understanding the causal direction of the potential relationship between self- and other-evaluations.

Because researchers studying negative other-evaluations have used varying methodologies (e.g. few experiments, many observational studies) and examined an assortment of ‘others’ (e.g. anxious people, non-anxious people) for evaluation, it is difficult to consolidate these findings to understand if negative other-evaluations are present and if they contribute to problematic cognitive and/or emotional consequences. Moreover, the idea that people with SAD view other anxious people negatively is consistent with social projection theory, in that evaluating oneself negatively would theoretically make someone more likely to see parts of themselves (i.e. anxiety, ‘incompetence’) in others (Krueger, 2007). We wonder if people who demonstrate negative evaluations of others might be doing so because of their repeated negative evaluations about themselves. This hypothesis is consistent with conceptualizations of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours maintaining through a positive-feedback loop, often associated with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT; Greenberger & Padesky, 2015).

Limited research has directly examined how people who experience anxiety in social situations evaluate other anxious people. Currently, most of what we know about other-evaluations comes from non-experimental studies, which reduces our understanding of the circumstances under which these evaluations appear. There is some evidence from observational research that people with social anxiety evaluate other people more negatively than people without social anxiety (e.g. Jones & Briggs, 1984; Jones & Carpenter, 1986; Niels Christensen et al., 2003; Purdon et al., 2001). Goh & Ong (2022) also observed that men (but not women) with greater social anxiety symptoms perceived their conversation partner as less warm, suggesting that anxiety experiences may be relevant to people’s other-evaluations. Furthermore, Alden & Taylor (2004) suggested that people with SAD might overtly demonstrate more critical and/or aggressive actions towards others. Recent findings have also supported this theory, demonstrating that people with greater social anxiety reported stronger aggressive reactions to rejection (Weerdmeester & Lange, 2019) or negative evaluation (Erwin et al., 2003) than people with lower social anxiety.

However, not all studies have found that people with greater social anxiety symptoms view others negatively. In fact, just as many or more studies found no differences in evaluations of others between people with social anxiety and without (Ashbaugh et al., 2005; Bielak & Moscovitch, 2013; Gee et al., 2012) or found that people with SAD make positive evaluations towards others (Alden & Wallace, 1995; Stopa & Clark, 1993). We previously found when clustering groups of undergraduate students and community members, that people who reported severe, mild-to-moderate, and low social anxiety gave mostly no judgements or positive judgements towards vignettes of hypothetical anxious people, rather than negative judgements (Ferguson & Ouimet, 2021). More recently, we conducted a study that experimentally examined the role of negative other-evaluations of a visibly anxious person on negative self-evaluations (Ferguson et al., 2023). Negative other-evaluations had no effect on self-evaluative cognitive, behavioural, or emotional outcomes; however, people who were assigned to judge others negatively demonstrated impaired memory for facts from their subsequent conversation task.

These conflicting findings may be attributable to methodological factors, including examining other-evaluations via exploratory analyses related to another primary goal, showing participants different stimuli (i.e. between-participants), or using a cross-sectional design. These studies were instrumental to beginning to understand negative other-evaluations; however, the diversity of methodologies and/or operationalization of other-evaluations across studies may have contributed to a lack of consistent findings. To address these concerns, our primary aim was to understand how negative self-evaluations contribute to other-evaluations and their associated sequalae by developing an experimental study that used a manipulation to induce negative self-evaluations among participants, standardized the study experience (e.g. watching the same stimuli, standard script to deliver instructions), and measured social anxiety-relevant emotional and cognitive variables.

Current study

Social projection theory suggests that people who evaluate themselves negatively might evaluate others similarly, suggesting a cyclical role within self- and other-evaluations. Research on how these self-evaluations relate to evaluations of others has resulted in conflicting findings from primarily cross-sectional designs, which limits our ability to understand causal relations. In line with the aims of experimental psychopathology research, we designed this experiment to examine the potential impact of hypothesized mechanisms (e.g. self- and other-evaluations) on the development and maintenance of a mental health disorder via experimental paradigms (Forsyth & Zvolensky, 2001; Ouimet et al., 2021). Following results from our earlier study where we found no considerable consequences (besides memory impairment) when we examined whether negative other-evaluations caused negative self-evaluations (Ferguson et al., 2023), we examined the opposite potential causal relation: does evaluating oneself negatively cause people to evaluate others negatively?

We recruited an unselected sample of undergraduate students and community members and invited them to participate in a study administered completely online, via interactions on Zoom with the experimenters. We chose an unselected sample on purpose – like many other experimental psychopathology studies (e.g. Alcolado & Radomsky, 2011; Gagné et al., 2021) – because we are attempting to recreate a hypothesized mechanism in people who do not necessarily have social anxiety, and observe the outcomes to better understand the specific role of that mechanism. Participants engaged in an impromptu conversation task with a confederate, while a judge ostensibly viewed their conversation. After, we communicated false-feedback (positive, ambiguous, negative; randomly assigned) from the judge about the quality of their performance, to induce different valences of self-evaluations. We then tested the impact of those self-evaluations on participants’ evaluation of a visibly anxious individual conversing with a non-anxious person. Our primary aim was to understand whether negative self-evaluations contribute to negative other-evaluations and their associated emotional and cognitive consequences.

Prior to any data collection, we pre-registered our methods, hypotheses, and data analysis plan on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/ya5uc). Our open dataset can be also be found on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/s3ja4/). We did not make any hypotheses for the positive- and ambiguous-feedback conditions but considered them both active control conditions. Compared to participants in the positive- and ambiguous-feedback conditions, we hypothesized that, participants in the negative-feedback condition would:

H1.Write a greater number of negative comments about their performance during the conversation task (manipulation check).

H2.Report more strongly negative evaluations of themselves on the self-version of the Public Speaking Performance Measure (PSPM-S) and the Ratings of Others Scale (ROOS-S) after the conversation task (manipulation check).

H3.Report greater subjective anxiety (SUDS) during the post-conversation task feedback, relative to the baseline, anticipatory phase, and video evaluation task (emotional hypothesis).

H4.Write a greater number of negative comments about the visibly anxious individual in the Video Evaluation Task (other-evaluation/cognitive hypothesis).

H5.Report more strongly negative evaluations of the visibly anxious individual on the other-version of the Public Speaking Performance Measure (PSPM-O) and the Ratings of Others Scale (ROOS) during the Video Evaluation Task (Other-evaluation/cognitive hypothesis).

Method

Participants

A power analysis (f = .25, α = .05, power = .80) for our primary analysis suggested a sample size of n = 165 (see sample size addendum on OSF: https://osf.io/fc95j). We recruited an unselected sample of undergraduate students and members of the community using a university participation pool and social media recruitment (N = 188; n_{Positive-feedback} = 62, n_{Ambiguous-feedback} = 60, and n_{Negative-feedback} = 66). People were eligible for this study if they had a high degree of English fluency (i.e. >70%), had access to a computer with a webcam and microphone, and were currently residing in Canada. Members of the community (compensated with entry into a draw) needed to be over 18 years old and undergraduate students (compensated with course credit) could be 17 years old. While pre-screening questions were built into the undergraduate student participation pool, we asked participants recruited through social media to complete a short online screening survey where they reported their age, gender, and English fluency, and confirmed they resided in Canada and had a device with a camera, microphone, and access to Zoom.

Procedure

We began data collection for this study shortly after the restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic were enforced. Although we initially planned for this study to take place in-person (laboratory-based study), we modified it to an experimenter-guided online study (for more information, see Ferguson et al., 2022). Study personnel (e.g. experimenter, conversation partner, judge, and participant) participated over Zoom, and all questionnaires were completed on Qualtrics^TM. Our study was reviewed and approved by the University Research Ethics Board (certificate no. H-01-20-5352). Before signing up, participants were told the goal of the study was to test new ways of measuring social skills.

Following the consent phase (i.e. by an active click after reading the consent form), we asked participants to complete several baseline questionnaires (see Baseline Questionnaires section) in a completely randomized order and then a baseline SUDS score (see Figure 1 for a procedure diagram). Then, we informed participants that they would participate in a 10-minute conversation task with another participant while a social skills judge evaluated their performance for use in our future social skills training. In fact, the social skills judge was an empty Zoom account with the camera and microphone turned off. Just before the experimenter added the conversation partner and social skills judge to the call for the conversation, we asked participants to complete a second SUDS (i.e. anticipatory anxiety). After 10 minutes had elapsed or after the participant chose to end the conversation early, the experimenter delivered false-feedback about the participant’s performance to induce negative interpretation biases and lead participants to evaluate themselves negatively. Participants were told the following (portions in italics varied depending on condition):

Positive-feedback¹: ‘Thank you for participating in our getting acquainted task! We are now going to provide you with some feedback on how you performed during the conversation task. As you know, this recording is very important, as the lab is beginning to develop a training program that aims to increase one’s social skills. Therefore, the quality of the data from this study is very important to us and to the status of our research lab. As such, we had a social skills judge evaluate your performance during the conversation task to get an idea of how they thought you did. The judge sent me a few comments that they thought best described your performance during the task. The judge… thought you were engaging, relaxed, and an enjoyable person to talk with, so they told me that we can use your video in our training! Please return to the Qualtrics page and advance to the next page to type something that you think the judge viewed positively about your performance during your conversation. In other words, what do you think it was about your performance that they judged so positively?’

Ambiguous-feedback: ‘…couldn’t decide whether your video should be used in our training after all. If you want, you can return to the Qualtrics page and advance to the next page to type something about your performance during the conversation that you could have done better. For example, if you had the chance to re-do it, what might you do differently?’

Negative-feedback: ‘…thought you were nervous, uncomfortable, and a bit awkward, so they told me that we can’t use your video at all in our training. Please return to the Qualtrics page and advance to the next page to type everything that you think the judge could have viewed negatively about your performance during your conversation. It’s really important that you type anything that they could have viewed negatively about you, as this is our last possible chance use your data for our future studies’.

Figure 1.

Procedure Diagram.

Immediately after, we asked participants to complete their third SUDS rating (i.e. post-feedback) and then type their thoughts about their performance. They then completed the PSPM-S and ROOS-S about their own performance. Subsequently, participants watched a four-minute Video Evaluation Task and then typed their thoughts about the visibly anxious person, completed a fourth and final SUDS rating (i.e. following other-evaluation), and responded to the PSPM-O and ROOS-O. Prior to debriefing, we asked participants several questions related to the manipulation (Debriefing Questionnaire) and the Self-Assessment Questions. After debriefing, we asked for all participants’ consent to continue to use their data, given that we used mild deception.

Baseline questionnaires

We asked participants to complete several questionnaires to characterize our sample and compare total scores at baseline between our conditions. Each baseline questionnaire included one ‘catch’ question (e.g. This question is to ensure that you are reading the items. Mark ‘very concerned’ to this question) that was randomly placed. Participants’ data were considered for removal if they answered more than two of the four questions incorrectly. See Table 1 for internal consistency and descriptive statistics of all measures.²

Table 1.

Descriptive statistics by condition for all variables of interest.

	Mean (SD)			Min–Max			α
	Positive	Ambiguous	Negative	Positive	Ambiguous	Negative
DASS-21 Depression	11.59 (7.71)	13.86 (9.96)	12.52 (8.96)	0.00–32.00	0.00–42.00	0.00–38.00	.90
Anxiety	10.81 (7.00)	11.05 (10.27)	12.62 (7.41)	0.00–34.00	0.00–42.00	0.00–28.00	—
Stress	16.85 (7.25)	15.68 (7.05)	16.48 (8.05)	4.00–36.00	0.00–36.00	2.00–36.00	—
SPIN	19.98 (11.00)	24.70 (14.88)	25.67 (12.37)	1.00–45.00	1.00–65.00	2.00–52.00	.91
SUDS1-Anxiety	28.98 (19.98)	27.02 (25.58)	25.90 (18.57)	0.00–84.00	0.00–76.00	0.00–82.00	—
SUDS2-Anxiety	37.89 (23.74)	40.67 (25.53)	39.64 (21.53)	0.00–92.00	0.00–100.00	0.00–91.00	—
SUDS3-Anxiety	26.06 (20.31)	31.60 (23.22)	35.14 (23.24)	0.00–80.00	0.00–91.00	0.00–86.00	—
# Negative self-comments	.49 (.81)	2.14 (1.11)	2.70 (1.56)	0.00–3.00	0.00–5.50	0.00–7.50	—
PSPM-S	17.83 (7.27)	23.74 (11.37)	26.12 (10.51)	3.00–37.00	3.00–47.00	7.00–53.00	.88
ROOS-S+	1.01 (.88)	.59 (.87)	.33 (1.02)	−1.00–3.00	−1.00–2.60	−2.30–2.90	.89
ROOS-S-	−1.46 (.81)	−.86 (1.15)	−.67 (1.12)	−2.90–.20	−3.00–1.50	−2.50–2.70	.89
SUDS4-Anxiety	16.52 (13.76)	22.19 (19.73)	24.15 (23.32)	0.00–61.00	0.00–76.00	0.00–100.00	—
PSPM-O	41.07 (10.72)	41.53 (11.84)	43.12 (11.60)	8.00–58.00	10.00–65.00	2.00–65.00	.90
ROOS-O+	−.85 (.82)	−.88 (.94)	−.97 (.87)	−2.40–2.10	−2.70–1.90	−2.70–2.40	.87
ROOS-O-	−.04 (.89)	.05 (.94)	.25 (.91)	−2.50–2.00	−2.70–1.90	−3.00–2.50	.83
# Negative other comments	5.02 (1.52)	4.71 (1.83)	4.95 (1.88)	2.00–9.00	1.50–9.00	1.50–9.00	—

Notes. N = 169. DASS-21 = Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale–21; SPIN = Social Phobia Inventory; SUDS1-Anxiety = Subjective Units of Distress Scale, Baseline; SUDS2-Anxiety = Subjective Units of Distress Scale, Anticipatory; SUDS3-Anxiety = Subjective Units of Distress Scale, After False-Feedback; PSPM-S = Public Speaking Performance Measure-Self version; ROOS-S+ = Ratings of Others Scale-Self version, positive attributes; ROOS-S- = Ratings of Others Scale-Self version, negative attributes; SUDS4-Anxiety = Subjective Units of Distress Scale, After Other-Evaluation; PSPM-O = Public Speaking Performance Measure-Other version; ROOS-O+ = Ratings of Others Scale-Other version, positive attributes; ROOS-O- = Ratings of Others Scale-Other version, negative attributes.

Sociodemographic questionnaire

Participants disclosed their age, gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, marital status, household income, university/occupational status, primary language, English fluency, and history and treatment of mood or anxiety disorders (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Sample characteristics.

Variable	n	%
Gender
Female	132	78.1
Male	35	20.7
Non-binary	2	1.2
Ethnicity/race
White	96	56.8
European	20	11.8
Black	19	11.2
Middle Eastern	18	10.7
Asian	17	10.1
South Asian	12	7.1
Other	7	4.1
Hispanic/Latinx	6	3.6
Caribbean	3	1.8
Indigenous	2	1.2
Pacific Islander	2	1.2
Relationship Status
Single	131	77.5
Long-term relationship	22	13.0
Living together	6	3.6
Married	5	3.0
Divorced	2	1.2
Widowed	1	0.6
Separated	1	0.6
Prefer not to answer	1	0.6
Self-reported previous psychological Dx
Yes	26	15.4
No	139	82.2
Prefer not answer	4	2.4

Notes. N = 169. Participants were able to check all ethnicity/race options that applied to them, which is why the frequency data is beyond the sample size.

Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale–21 (DASS-21)

The DASS-21 (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) is a 21-item self-report measure of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. Participants rated how much each statement applied to them on a Likert scale (0 = did not apply to me at all to 3 = applied to me very much, or most of the time). The DASS-21 subscales demonstrate good to excellent internal consistency (α = .87 to .94) and good concurrent validity with the Beck Depression Inventory and Beck Anxiety Inventory (Antony et al., 1998).

Social phobia inventory (SPIN)

The SPIN (Connor et al., 2000) is a 17-item self-report measure that examines fear, avoidance, and physiological discomfort in social situations. Participants responded to each item based on how much it bothered them over the past week on a five-point Likert scale (0 = not at all to 4 = extremely). The SPIN ranges from good to excellent internal consistency (α = .87 to .94) and shows convergent validity with the Brief Social Phobia Scale (Connor et al., 2000).

Outcome Questionnaires

Public Speaking Performance Measure (PSPM)

We used the PSPM (Rapee & Lim, 1992) as an indicator of subjective public speaking performance. Participants rated themselves after their conversation task (PSPM-S) and the videotaped anxious person (PSPM-O) after the Video Evaluation Task. Participants responded to 17 items including 12 specific items (e.g. had a clear voice) and 5 global items (e.g. generally spoke well) on a five-point Likert scale (0 = not at all to 4 = very much). The PSPM specific and global items within the self- and other-versions demonstrate good internal consistency (α = .79 to .86) and good inter-rater reliability (r = .86 to .93; Rodebaugh & Chambless, 2002).

Ratings of others scale (ROOS)

We used the ROOS (see Ferguson et al., 2023; Appendix B) as an indicator of participants’ evaluations of their own character (ROOS-S; self) or the character of the visibly anxious person (ROOS-O; other). Besides the instructions given to participants (i.e. think about yourself vs think about the person on the right of the video), both versions are identical and include 10 positive (e.g. attractive, intelligent) and 10 negative (e.g. boring, inadequate) attributes taken from previous literature (e.g. de Jong, 2002; Egloff & Schmukle, 2002; Purdon et al., 2001). Participants rated each item using a visual analog scale (−3 = strongly disagree to +3 = strongly agree). We calculated one positive and one negative subscale score by summing all 10 attributes and dividing by 10, leading to a possible range between −3 (strong disagreement with attributes) and +3 (strong agreement with attributes). The positive and negative items on the ROOS self- and other-versions demonstrate good to excellent internal consistency (α = .83 to .90; Ferguson et al., 2023).

Reflections on performance

After participants completed their 10-minute conversation task and received their false-feedback, they were instructed to type their thoughts about themselves during their conversation (Conversation Reflection). Additionally, after participants completed the Video Evaluation Task, they were similarly asked to type their thoughts about the woman on the right (who appeared anxious; Video Reflection). Participants answered using bullet points or paragraph form. Two research assistants, unaware of the study goals, hypotheses, or the experimental conditions, coded the number of negative comments about 1) themselves after their conversation task; 2) their conversation partner; 3) the visibly anxious person in the Video Evaluation Task; and 4) the confident person in the Video Evaluation Task. We conducted an intraclass correlation coefficient to determine inter-rater reliability and congruence ratings for all four questions (ICC_ConvoSelf: .90; ICC_ConvoOther: .86; ICC_VideoAnxious: .86; ICC_{VideoConfident}: .13³). Given the congruence score, we calculated an average of the two scorers to have one variable for each of the four questions.

Subjective Units of Distress Scale (SUDS)

The SUDS (Wolpe, 1958) measures participants’ subjective state distress. We asked participants to rate their level of anxiety, rather than distress. We also included three additional emotions to reduce response biases (anger, guilt, and happiness; Stopa & Clark, 1993). Participants rated the emotions on a visual analog scale (0 = totally relaxed to 100 = highest anxiety that you have ever felt).

Self-assessment questions

Prior to debriefing, we asked participants to rate their perceived effort, how much attention they gave, and if they thought we should use their data.

Debriefing questionnaire

Prior to debriefing, we asked participants to rate several questions (see Appendix C) about the study including 1) how much they considered the judge’s feedback when rating their own behaviour on the PSPM-O; 2) how high their standards were when rating themselves; 3) how much they focused on their small mistakes; and 4) how convinced⁴ they were that we were measuring social skills (see Manipulation Check section).

Computerized tasks

Conversation task

The task took place entirely over Zoom (see Ferguson et al., 2022). The conversation partner and ‘judge’ were added to the Zoom call after the participants received instructions. The conversation was unstructured and used an opposite-gender conversation partner (e.g. Beidel et al., 1985; Ferguson et al., 2023; Thompson & Rapee, 2002). We randomly assigned participants who identified as non-binary or declined to answer a preliminary gender-identity question to any confederate. We informed participants that they could end the conversation at any time; however, only two participants ended before 10 minutes.

Video evaluation task

After receiving their false-feedback, participants were instructed to watch a four-minute video of two people who were interacting for the first time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfNmvRj758). One person was trained to display obvious signs of anxiety (e.g. mumbling, stuttering, fidgeting, and avoiding eye contact), whereas their partner did not (Ashbaugh et al., 2005; Bielak et al., 2018) (see Ferguson et al., 2023).

Data preparation

We deemed 18 participants’ data ineligible to be used in our data analyses: 8 participants answered more than two catch questions incorrectly; 4 participants had technology issues and ended the study early; 2 participants knew the confederate was pretending to be another participant; 2 participants went too far in the survey and responded incorrectly to the study questions; 1 participant arrived significantly late and was not tested; and 1 withdrew their consent at the end of the study. Data were visually scanned for any impossible values and for skewness and kurtosis. Prior to analyses, the conditions were anonymized so the first author was unaware of the conditions until all data were analyzed. Our final sample was N = 169 (n_{Positive-feedback} = 54, n_{Ambiguous-feedback} = 57, and n_{Negative-feedback} = 58).

Hypothesis testing

To test if condition affected the number of negative comments participants wrote about themselves after the conversation task (H1; manipulation check), we conducted a one-way ANOVA. To test if condition affected participants’ self-evaluations (H2; manipulation check), we conducted two separate one-way ANOVAs using the PSPM-S and ROOS-S as dependent variables. To test if condition affected participants’ self-reported anxiety (H3), we conducted a 3 (condition) x 4 (time) repeated measures ANOVA. To test if condition affected the number of negative comments participants wrote about the visibly anxious person in the Video Evaluation Task (H4), we conducted a one-way ANOVA using the combined score from our independent coders. To test if condition affected participants’ other-evaluations (H5), we conducted two separate one-way ANOVAs using PSPM-O and ROOS-O as dependent variables. In our pre-registration, we planned to explore whether social anxiety symptoms moderate the relationship between condition and our primary dependent variables. However, we did not report these findings because they conflict with our subsequent data analysis decisions (i.e. ANCOVA).

Results

We observed a significant difference on participants’ baseline SPIN scores, F(2,166) = 3.09, p = .048, η_p² = .04, but there were no differences between conditions on the DASS-21 (all Fs < .90, ps > .41). People in the positive-feedback condition reported significantly fewer social anxiety symptoms at baseline than the negative-feedback condition. There were no differences between the ambiguous- and negative-feedback conditions or the positive- and ambiguous-feedback conditions (see Table 3 for all follow-up t-statistics). Due to this difference, we deviated from our pre-registration (see Appendix D) by using baseline social anxiety scores (SPIN) as a covariate in all primary analyses.⁵

Table 3.

Follow-up t-tests for manipulation and data integrity checks.

Condition Comparisons	d.f.	t	p	D
SPIN
Positive*Ambiguous	113	.38	.70	.36
Negative*Ambiguous	113	.38	.70	.07
Negative*Positive	110	2.57	.01	.49
# Negative comments
PositiveAmbiguous*	102	8.96	<.001	.70
NegativeAmbiguous*	103	2.20	.03	.25
NegativePositive*	87	9.48	<.001	1.78
PSPM-S
PositiveAmbiguous*	96	3.28	.001	.62
Negative*Ambiguous	113	1.17	.25	.22
NegativePositive*	102	4.88	<.001	.92
ROOS-S+
Positive*Ambiguous	109	2.47	.02	.47
Negative*Ambiguous	113	1.52	.13	.28
Negative*Positive	110	3.78	<.001	.71
ROOS-S-
PositiveAmbiguous*	101	3.17	.02	.60
Negative*Ambiguous	113	.91	.37	.17
Negative*Positive	110	4.24	<.001	.81

Note. SPIN = Social Phobia Inventory; PSPM-S = Public Speaking Performance Measure-Self version; ROOS-S+ = Ratings of Others Scale-Self version, positive attributes; ROOS-S- = Ratings of Others Scale-Self version, negative attributes. For t-tests that had heteroscedasticity, we interpreted the equal variances not assumed (denoted with a **).

Manipulation and data integrity checks

We found a significant effect of condition on the number of negative comments participants wrote about themselves after their conversation task, while controlling for social anxiety (H1). Social anxiety was a significant covariate (see Table 4 for the F-statistics for all covariate analyses). Participants in the negative-feedback condition wrote significantly more negative comments than the other conditions; the ambiguous-feedback condition wrote fewer than the positive-feedback condition (see Table 3 for all follow-up t-statistics). While controlling for social anxiety, we also observed significant effects of condition on subjective self-performance (PSPM-S), positive self-characteristics (ROOS-S+), and negative self-characteristics (ROOS-S-). Across all significant effects, participants in the positive-feedback condition reported 1) significantly fewer subjective performance flaws (PSPM); 2) stronger agreement with the positive characteristics (ROOS-S+); and 3) stronger disagreement with the negative characteristics (ROOS-S-) task than the other conditions; the ambiguous- and negative-feedback conditions did not differ from each other. Additional checks using the Debriefing Questionnaire supported overall data integrity (see Appendix E).⁶

Table 4.

Main analyses with SPIN as a covariate.

	Sum of Squares	d.f.	Mean Square	F	p	η _p ²
# Negative self-comments (H1)*
Condition	128.57	2165	64.28	45.07	<.001	.35
Condition*SPIN	7.77	1165	7.77	5.45	.02	.03
PSPM-S (H2)
Condition	1119.01	2165	559.51	7.05	.001	.08
Condition*SPIN	3248.63	1165	3248.63	40.96	<.001	.20
ROOS-S+ (H2)
Condition	8.13	2165	4.07	5.22	.006	.06
Condition*SPIN	15.19	1165	15.19	19.49	<.001	.11
ROOS-S- (H2)
Condition	9.43	2165	4.72	5.48	.005	.06
Condition*SPIN	39.68	1165	39.68	46.09	<.001	.22
SUDS (H3)*
Time	1035.96	3495	369.00	1.71	.17	.01
Condition	2.68	2165	1.34	.006	.99	<.001
TimeSPIN Time	3502.13	3495	1247.44	5.79	.001	.03
Condition	3124.66	6495	556.49	2.58	.02	.03
# Negative other-comments (H4)
Condition	3.05	2165	1.53	.49	.61	.006
Condition*SPIN	.20	1165	.20	.06	.80	<.001
PSPM-O (H5)
Condition	114.16	2165	57.08	.44	.65	.001
Condition*SPIN	19.96	1165	19.96	.15	.70	.005
ROOS-O+ (H5)
Condition	.44	2165	.22	.28	.75	.003
Condition*SPIN	<.001	1165	<.001	.001	.98	<.001
ROOS-O- (H5)
Condition	2.37	2165	1.18	1.42	.25	.02
Condition*SPIN	.05	1165	.05	.06	.81	<.001

Note. PSPM-S = Public Speaking Performance Measure-Self version; ROOS-S+ = Ratings of Others Scale-Self version, positive attributes; ROOS-S- = Ratings of Others Scale-Self version, negative attributes; SUDS = Subjective Units of Distress Scale; PSPM-O = Public Speaking Performance Measure-Other version; ROOS-O+ = Ratings of Others Scale-Other version, positive attributes; ROOS-O- = Ratings of Others Scale-Other version, negative attributes. Some of our analyses violated the assumptions of homogeneity and homoscedasticity. For ANCOVAs that had heterogeneity (denoted with a *), we used the F_max rule described by Tabachnick & Fidell (2018; all ratios were acceptable < 4:1).

Hypothesis testing

There were no significant effects of time or condition on self-reported anxiety (H3), while controlling for social anxiety. However, social anxiety was a significant covariate (see Table 4). There was also a statistically significant condition by time interaction on self-reported anxiety. However, when conducting follow-up simple main effects tests, we found no significant effects (all Fs < 2.34, ps > .10), which is consistent with the small effect size found for the significant interaction. While controlling for social anxiety, there were also no significant effects of condition on the number of negative comments written about the visibly anxious person (H4), subjective performance of the visibly anxious person (PSPM-O; H5), or evaluations of the visibly anxious person’s positive and negative characteristics (ROOS-O; H5). See Table 4 for all significant and non-significant analyses using SPIN as covariate.

Exploratory analyses

Given that our manipulation included false-feedback, along with some research findings that people with social fears may display more critical or aggressive reactions to rejection or negative evaluation, we decided to examine outcomes on our SUDS-anger variable. While controlling for social anxiety, we found no significant effect of time nor an interaction between time and SPIN covariate on anger. There was a significant effect of condition and a significant interaction between time and condition. We used a Dunn–Sidak p-value correction (p = .007) for multiple comparisons when conducting simple main effects tests to explore the nature of the interaction. People in the positive-feedback condition reported significantly less anger at SUDS T4 (Video Evaluation) than T1 (Baseline) and T2 (Anticipatory); their anger was also significantly lower at T3 (Post-Feedback) than T2. At both T3 and T4, participants in the negative-feedback condition reported significantly greater anger than the other conditions; the positive and ambiguous conditions did not significantly differ. See Appendix F for descriptions of exploratory analyses for the other SUDS emotions and remaining exploratory analyses.

Discussion

To the best of our knowledge, our study was the first to use experimental methods to understand if negative self-evaluation causes people to negatively evaluate others, within the predominately under-researched area of other-evaluations and social anxiety. We found that after successfully delivering an experimental manipulation (positive-, ambiguous-, and negative-feedback), which induced participants to evaluate themselves accordingly, participants in the negative-feedback condition did not evaluate a visibly anxious person more negatively or report feeling greater anxiety than the other two conditions. Our findings suggest that there may be no direct relationship between self- and other-evaluations, at least in the way we initially tested it (i.e. within a single session, with unselected participants, using a recorded social interaction).

In all experimental studies, interpretations of the outcomes depend necessarily on the validity of the manipulation; we found participants across our three conditions generally followed our manipulation instructions in the way we anticipated. Participants in the positive-feedback condition wrote the fewest negative comments about themselves after their conversation task, reported the fewest subjective performance flaws on the PSPM-S, and reported the strongest agreement with the positive ROOS characteristics and strongest disagreement with the negative characteristics. After statistically controlling for the effect of social anxiety, participants in the ambiguous- and negative-feedback conditions reported similar responses to many of our manipulation checks; how they rated their own subjective performance flaws (PSPM-S) and self-characteristics (ROOS-S). Extant research indicates that people with higher social anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous situations more negatively (e.g. Beard & Amir, 2010; Stopa & Clark, 2000). Given that we observed this interpretation bias in a university/community sample, this finding highlights that direct performance feedback can prompt even people without social anxiety to evaluate themselves negatively.

Our lack of significant effects of self-evaluation on other-evaluation does not support our hypotheses or social projection theory (i.e. negative self-evaluations did not influence negative other-evaluations). We became interested in studying the relationship between negative self- and other-evaluations from our experiences working with clients with SAD. Therefore, we expected people who evaluated themselves negatively to subsequently evaluate a visibly anxious person negatively. Instead, we found that regardless of condition, participants evaluated the visibly anxious person in the social interaction video similarly. Although it is possible that no true relationship between negative self- and other-evaluations exists – consistent with some prior research findings (e.g. Alden & Wallace, 1995; Ashbaugh et al., 2005) – there may be other reasons for our observed lack of between-condition differences. Perhaps negative self-evaluations only turn outward (i.e. negative other-evaluations) in individuals whose symptoms meet diagnostic criteria for SAD and thus have a longer history of negative self-evaluations. Given that we provided only one opportunity for participants to negatively evaluate themselves, it is possible that repeated self-evaluations would lead to different results, more aligned with how people with SAD evaluate themselves. Moreover, we tested our hypotheses in only one social situation – a one-on-one recorded social interaction. We prioritized internal validity by ensuring all participants rated the same video; however, it’s possible the situation was not relevant to all participants, a necessary factor when developing experimental psychopathology designs (e.g. Ashbaugh & Ouimet, 2023; Radomsky & Rachman, 2004). Additionally, the visibly anxious person in the Video Evaluation Task demonstrated several noticeable signs of anxiety (e.g. hiding face, fidgeting, and stumbling over words). The PSPM includes many specific items (i.e. overt performance) and few global (i.e. up for interpretation) items; this obvious link between the visibly anxious person’s behaviour and the items on the PSPM might explain why participants in all conditions seemingly recognized and reported the anxious person’s performance deficits similarly. Perhaps a more subtle display of anxiety would have been detected differently by the negative-feedback condition, who just recently evaluated themselves negatively.

We were surprised that our conditions differed in their baseline social anxiety scores, given random assignment. Notably, we included the SPIN as a co-variate in all primary analyses; however, the SPIN emerged as a significant covariate only for participants’ self-evaluation (i.e. # negative self-comments, PSPM-S, ROOS-S), which we used as manipulation checks. The SPIN was not a significant covariate for any of our hypotheses related to other-evaluations (i.e. negative other-comments, PSPM-O, and ROOS-O). This finding is consistent with research and clinical theory that suggest people with social anxiety display more criticism towards their own performance than the performance of others (Koban et al., 2017). Furthermore, the lack of impact of SPIN scores on condition and other-evaluations in our covariate analyses provides more evidence that other-evaluations may not be a hallmark of social anxiety.

Although our primary emotional and cognitive hypotheses were not supported, our findings tell us much about the consequences (or lack thereof) of negative self-evaluations. We were surprised that participants in the negative- and ambiguous-feedback conditions did not report significantly greater state anxiety than the positive-feedback condition after receiving their false-feedback, even though they wrote down more negative comments about themselves. Consistent with cognitive-behavioural models, we anticipated that thinking about one’s performance after receiving negative feedback would have increased state anxiety. Instead, through our exploratory analyses, we found that participants in the negative-feedback condition reported greater state anger than the other conditions. This finding was exclusive to people in the negative-feedback condition, suggesting overt negative evaluation, rather than interpretation biases, leads to increased anger. This finding is consistent with the social psychology literature on the relationship between interpersonal rejection and anger (see Leary et al., 2006 for review). For example, Buckley et al. (2004) found that participants who received negative or rejecting feedback reported feeling angrier compared to those who received more positive feedback. Relatedly, there is increasing evidence that people with social anxiety may demonstrate critical or angry responses when faced with rejection or negative evaluation (e.g. Alden & Taylor, 2004; Erwin et al., 2003; Weerdmeester & Lange, 2019) and in their everyday life (Kashdan & Collins, 2010). Because this was an exploratory analysis, we interpret the finding with caution. Future research should further study the role of anger, along with anxiety and shame, as distressing emotional consequences of receiving negative feedback, among people across the continuum of social anxiety levels.

Limitations and Future Directions

Although we randomly assigned all participants to their experimental condition prior to their scheduled testing block, participants in the negative-feedback condition reported significantly greater social anxiety symptoms on the SPIN, than the positive- and ambiguous-feedback conditions at baseline. The average SPIN scores of each condition were above the original clinical cutoff of 19 (Connor et al., 2000) but were all below the more stringent cutoff of 30 more frequently used in recent research (Moser et al., 2008). Because the social anxiety experiences across the conditions were not equal, we were required to statistically control for social anxiety severity for our primary analyses. This decision was important to avoid the potential for social anxiety to act as a confound; however, it may have reduced some of the variability we attempted to include, given our recruitment of an unselected sample.

Additionally, although we calculated our power analysis using a medium effect size (estimated from our previous experimental study), we observed small-to-medium effects for our significant findings. It is possible we failed to observe significant differences with small effects across our conditions on some of our primary hypotheses, due to the sample size. Therefore, future research should consider using a small-to-medium effect size in their power calculation to minimize their Type I error probabilities further.

Our use of an online, experimenter-guided environment might also limit the generalizability of our findings. Although online experimental research is instrumental to maintaining research during a pandemic and increasing accessibility for participants, it may also alter the expected outcomes in diverse ways. For example, as discussed in our recent case study (Ferguson et al., 2022), participants experienced more technology interruptions and distractions, than our typical in-person research studies. Additionally, hiding one’s body can be an important safety behaviour that reduces anxiety during social anxiety provoking tasks (e.g. standing at a podium during a speech; e.g. Tutino et al., 2020); participants may have felt more comfortable in their own environments, showing only their faces, than in an in-person novel laboratory setting. Additionally, our ambiguous-feedback instructions (i.e. ‘…type something about your performance during the conversation that you could have done better…’) might have increased participants’ attention to the negative aspects of their performance and consequently contributed to our overall lack of differences between the ambiguous- and negative-feedback conditions. Future research might use a slightly more ambiguous instruction, for example, ‘…that you might have done differently…’. Furthermore, a one-on-one social interaction is one of many anxiety-provoking social situations. Future research should continue to explore the relationship between self- and other-evaluations across diverse social contexts (e.g. job interviews, conversing with strangers, and giving a presentation). Taken together, it is possible that data collected online, with respect to a circumscribed social situation, produce different outcomes than those in-person to diverse situations, particularly with respect to anxiety.

Implications

Research on negative other-evaluations has led to conflicting findings, primarily due to methodological choices, lack of operationalization, and testing other-evaluations only in an exploratory manner. Furthermore, until this point, there were no experiments that tested whether negative self-evaluations (commonly experienced by people with social fears) lead to negative other-evaluations while observing a social interaction. We found that participants’ negative self-evaluations did not lead them to see negative aspects in others (i.e. inconsistent with social projection theory) any more than people who received positive- and ambiguous-feedback. Our null results may have implications for existing social-cognitive models (i.e. social projection theory) and cognitive-behavioural models for social anxiety. People who appear to evaluate others negatively (as we have observed) may be doing so because of mechanisms unrelated to social anxiety.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Does evaluating oneself cause evaluations of others while observing a social interaction? An experimental investigation of the cognitive and emotional consequences following a false-feedback task

Supplemental Material for Does evaluating oneself cause evaluations of others while observing a social interaction? An experimental investigation of the cognitive and emotional consequences following a false-feedback task by Ryan J Ferguson and Allison J Ouimet in Journal of Experimental Psychopathology.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Amélie Burla, Mohamad Mehrez, Jeremy Oueis, Patrick Racine, Michela Rodriguez, Nicole Simmonds, Tara Snyder, Anjali Thomas, and Philip Trepiak for their help with data collection for this study. We also thank Kanika Dewan and Jaidon MacLean for their help with coding participants’ written responses.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Scholarship to the first author (grant number 752-2019-1659) and a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to the second author (RGPIN 2017-05295). Neither funding source had any role in study design; data collection, analysis, or interpretation; writing of the report; or decision to submit the article for publication.

ORCID iDs

Ryan J Ferguson

Allison J Ouimet

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biographies

Ryan J Ferguson, MA is a clinical psychology doctoral student at the University of Ottawa and a resident at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton. Ryan specializes in the assessment, treatment, and research of anxiety and anxiety-related disorders using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Allison J Ouimet, PhD is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology program, part of the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa. She is also a licensed Clinical Psychologist with the College of Psychologists of Ontario. As Director of the Cognition and Anxiety Disorders Research (CADRe) Lab, her research focuses on how beliefs, emotions, and behaviours influence each other to cause and maintain anxiety disorders, with a specific emphasis on emotion regulation and experimental methods. She is a former Editor-in-Chief for the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, and is on the Editorial Board at Journal of Experimental Psychopathology. She is the 2018 laureate of the Canadian Psychological Association’s President’s New Researcher Award, has presented her research at several national and international conferences, and published in a variety of scientific journals.

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