Getting to Know Your Social Anxiety
55Research from our center (Antony et al. 2005) suggests that people who are 
socially anxious make different types of social comparisons than do those who are less 
anxious. Speciﬁcally, social anxiety is associated with a tendency to make more frequent 
“upward” comparisons. In other words, people who are socially anxious are more likely 
to compare themselves to people they perceive as better than they are. The tendency 
to make upward comparisons increases the likelihood that an individual will feel worse 
after making the comparison.
Can you think of recent examples of when you have compared yourself to someone 
whom you perceived to be more attractive, more competent, less anxious, stronger, or 
smarter than you are? Or, did you make an upward comparison on some other dimension? 
How did you feel afterward? Do you often tend to compare yourself to people whom 
you perceive to be ideal or perfect on a certain dimension, rather than people whom you 
perceive to be typical or average? In the space below, describe an example of a time when 
you compared yourself to someone who was much “better” than you in some way.
COULD YOU BENEFIT FROM IMPROVING YOUR “PEOPLE SKILLS”?
Everyone has times when they give off the wrong impression simply because they 
didn’t know how to communicate a particular message to another person or group. 
Generally, this is not a big problem unless it happens frequently or in situations where 
there is a lot at stake.
In most cases, people who are socially anxious have ﬁne social skills, though they tend 
to assume that their social skills are much worse than they actually are. Furthermore, as 
their anxiety decreases and they obtain more practice interacting with others in the situ -