School of Psychology

Sunglasses and Scrutiny in Socially Evaluative Situations.

Researcher:             Tahnee Bailey

Supervisor:               Peter Drummond

Introduction:
Social anxiety is described as an intense fear of being scrutinised or being evaluated negatively by others in social situations (Chen & Drummond, 2008). The degree and intensity of social anxiety is highly influenced by a number of factors such as scrutiny, an individual’s fear of being evaluated negatively, eye contact and the somatic symptoms of embarrassment such as blushing. Eye contact plays an important role in the maintenance and onset of social anxiety. Individuals who are socially anxious will often avoid eye contact in social settings when they fear that others may judge them.  Research suggests that individuals that are socially anxious are more likely to notice internal changes, such as blushing, increased heart rate, breathing rate and sweating, and they believe that others also notice these symptoms leading the observer to make a negative judgement.
In this study we aimed to investigate the role that different levels of eye contact have on social anxiety specially on fear of negative evaluation. There are five levels of eye contact: (1) No sunglasses; (2) only the participant wearing sunglasses; (3) only the experimenter wearing sunglasses; (4) both the experimenter and the participant wearing sunglasses; (5) The experimenter is not in the room. The sunglasses were used to make the eye contact levels as naturalistic as possible, without participants having to be directed to maintain eye contact. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of eye contact and scrutiny on negative evaluations and fear of being negatively evaluated by others. 

Overview of the Study
The sample consisted of 50 undergraduate students (15 males, and 35 females) aged between 17 and 54 years with a mean age of 24.52 years. Prior to testing participants completed the Fear of Negative Evaluation questionnaire and the blushing propensity scale.
 On the day of testing participants were asked to read a short chapter from “The Heart – Mind Connection”. Once the participant had read the information they were connected to physiological equipment that monitored heart rate, skin conductance, respiration rate and forehead pulses. Each participant was then left alone in the room for 5 minutes to establish a baseline.
Participants were asked to rate their mood in terms of how anxious and embarrassed they currently felt and were also asked to rate blushing on a scale of 1 to 5 (1-not at all, 2-a little, 3-moderately, 4-quite a bit, 5-a lot). In the first part of the experiment, participants were asked 10 recall questions relating to the information that they had previously read. For questions 3, 5, 6, 8 and 10 participants received negative feedback such as ‘that’s not right’, ‘that’s incorrect’ or ‘not quite right’ regardless of their response. Participants were then asked to complete the self report rating in terms of anxiety, embarrassment and blushing. Participants were then asked 10 general psychology questions. For questions 2, 4, 7 and 10, negative feedback was provided. Participants were then asked to rate their mood again.
Participants were then read the statements off the 'fear of negative evaluations' questionnaire and asked to respond either true or false. Then they were asked to rate their mood again. Finally participants were read the items on the blushing propensity scale and asked to rate each statement on a scale of one to five, where 1 corresponded to never, and 5 corresponded to always. Responses to the questionnaires were recorded by the experimenter. At the conclusion of the study participants were asked to rate their mood one final time.
What we found

• In general there was no significant difference in ratings based on the level of eye contact. However it is interesting to note that although the difference was not significant there was some evidence of variation between the conditions.
• There was some variation in the embarrassment ratings between conditions, however this was not significant. Interestingly condition one rated their embarrassment lower than participants in other conditions throughout the experiment. Participants in condition two rated their embarrassment higher than participants in the other conditions.
• Participants across conditions reported that they were more embarrassed following the recall questions and general psychology questions than during any other time. Participants generally reported that they felt more anxious after the recall section and general psychology questions.

Concluding Remarks
Although the current study didn’t support many of the original hypotheses, it did highlight some interesting patterns in the data. Previous research in this area has used singing or a speech task to manipulate scrutiny, this study aimed to use a more naturalistic interaction. It was shown by the increases in the self report ratings that this form of scrutiny was somewhat effective.
 The study was designed to manipulate eye contact to determine if various levels or types of eye contact can provide relief or make individuals feel more anxious in a socially evaluative situation. The results showed that participants generally reported feeling more embarrassed and anxious following the evaluative task than during other sections of the experiment. There were no overall significant differences based on the conditions only, but some interesting trends did arise. The current study due to time and resource constraints had a small sample size that was not representative of the general population. There is room for much more constructive research in this area.