Anxiety: The Reason It Can Socially Isolate You

Posted on July 8, 2015

Anxiety interferes with the ability to take other people’s perspective, new research reveals. Anxiety makes people focus more on themselves and reduces their empathy for others, psychologists have found. The study’s results may help explain why anxiety can be such an isolating emotion (Todd et al., 2015).

For the research, people were made anxious by recounting a nervous moment from their past. Then they were given a series of tests. In one they were shown a picture of a person with a book next to them. They were asked to say which side it was on. Although the book was on the man in the picture’s left-hand-side, it was on the viewer’s right-hand side. In other words: whether you see the book on the right or the left depends on whose perspective you are taking. Over half of non-anxious people said the book was on the left, indicating they’d taken the other person’s perspective. But, of the anxious people, only about one-quarter took the other person’s perspective.

The study’s authors concluded:
“…anxious participants displayed greater egocentrism in their mental-state reasoning: They were more likely to describe an object using their own spatial perspective, had more difficulty resisting egocentric interference when identifying an object from others’ spatial perspectives, and relied more heavily on privileged knowledge when inferring others’ beliefs.” And they don’t think these results are explained by anxiety being a negative emotion. The restricted empathy seems to be a unique effect of anxiety.


Category(s):Anxiety, Social Anxiety / Phobia

Source material from Journal of Experimental Psychology: General