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Emotion Regulation And Social Anxiety

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Emotion Regulation Mediates the Relationship between Mindfulness and Social Anxiety
Mindfulness refers to paying attention to the present-moment experience by acknowledging and accepting thoughts and emotions without judgement or reactiveness (Morgan et al., 2014). Social anxiety in adolescents is experienced commonly as marked fear of social situations in case embarrassment or humiliation may occur. (Essau, Conradt, & Peterman, 1999). Notably, there are well-known links between mindfulness and social anxiety with research reporting higher levels of mindfulness predict lower levels of social anxiety (Rasmussen & Pidgeon, 2011; Schmertz, Masuda, & Anderson, 2012). Indeed, mindfulness enables cognitions that lead to emotional anguish to be …show more content…

Research postulates that social anxiety is associated with emotion dysregulation, that is higher use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies such as rumination, catastrophizing, and displaying an exaggerated threat response to external cues (Blalock, Kashdan, & Farmer, 2015). In contrast, people with higher levels of mindfulness utilise higher levels of emotion regulation skills (Blalock et al., 2015). Therefore, it is argued that in anxiety provoking social situations, a person with higher levels of mindfulness skills will challenge their anxious emotions. Drawing on their mindfulness skills they are able to refocus attention, and perhaps concentrate on their surroundings to help them feel less anxious. By focusing less on self-interest and thoughts of the past or future, they will not "jump to conclusions" regarding their emotional experience. As such, their use of mindfulness skills will lead to emotion regulation with more positive emotions and less negative emotions experienced therefore reducing their social anxiety. Therefore, considering mindfulness is associated with emotion regulation and that emotion regulation is associated with social anxiety, is the negative influence of mindfulness on social anxiety explained by a increase in emotion regulation? Consequently, as shown in figure 1, it is hypothesised that

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