Training Plan: In the present application, I am requesting 2 years of support for pre-doctoral research in clinical and experimental psychology. The proposed training plan involves regular meetings with my sponsor (Dr. Michelle Craske), co-sponsor (Dr. Naomi Eisenberger), and consultants (Dr. Bruce Naliboff and Michael Fanslow), a focused course load and training opportunities that specifically address gaps in my research experience, and the completion of two related research projects. Research Plan: The overarching goal of this research is to examine the role of social pain experiences in the onset of clinically significant anxiety. Social Anxiety Disorder has a lifetime prevalence rate of 12.1% n the United States and is associated with significant comorbidity, functional impairment, and resource utilization (Ruscio et al., 2008). Despite this, the etiology of the disorder is not well understood, with little research having been conducted on the way that social fears develop and become impairing for individuals. The proposed studies represent a merger of the social pain and fear conditioning literature, two areas that are strongly conceptually related but have largely been researched in isolation. Two studies will be conducted that examine the responses of individuals high and low in social anxiety to a social pain cue. The social pain cue utilized in ths study aims to be ecologically valid and personally relevant while also being discrete and aversive in an attempt to reconcile different methodologies from social pain and fear conditioning paradigms. The manipulation involves participants being asked questions by a male interviewer in a virtual reality paradigm prior and then being presented with negative verbal feedback from the same interviewer during the experiment. In using this paradigm, the present research seeks to replicate the findings of the small amount of research that has been done in the field, while simultaneously addressing some of the limitations of the previous designs and extending their findings in new directions. Prior to conducting Study 1, substantial pilot testing will be conducted in order to establish the level of the social pain cue that is simultaneously ethically appropriate and effectively aversive. In both Study 1 and Study 2 participants high and low in social anxiety will be presented with social and physical pain cues of varying intensity and have their skin conductance, heart rate, fear-potentiated startle, blushing, and subjective distress recorded. The first study will examined whether the unconditioned response to a social pain cue differs from the more typically utilized physically painful cue in significant quantitativ (magnitude of responding) and qualitative (indices of responding) ways. The second study will examine whether a social pain experience is aversive enough to produce a conditioned fear response. Participants will undergo a classical conditioning paradigm in which three neutral male faces are paired with an angry male face giving negative feedback about the participants'performance in an earlier task, physically aversive electrical muscle stimulation, or a neutral face making a neutral statement.
Social Anxiety Disorder has a lifetime prevalence rate of 12.1% in the United States and is associated with significant comorbidity, functional impairment, and resource utilization (Ruscio et al., 2008). Despite this, the etiology of the disorder is not wll understood, with little research having been conducted on the way that social fears develop and become impairing for individuals. The overarching goal of this research is to examine the role of social pain experiences in the onset of clinically significant anxiety with the goal of better understanding the etiology of this disabling disorder in order to improve methods of prevention and treatment for it.
