Predictors of Excessive Reassurance Seeking in Social Anxiety

Purpose There has been limited research conducted on the nature and consequences of excessive reassurance seeking in individuals with social anxiety, who tend to worry about the impression they make in evaluative social contexts. We examined the effects of self-reported trait social anxiety, low self-certainty, and engagement in post-event processing on reassurance seeking behaviours. Methods The sample consisted of 399 non-clinical undergraduate participants who completed self-report questionnaires in an online pre-registered correlational study. Results Partially consistent with our preregistered hypothesis, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that each predictor variable explained unique variance in reassurance seeking behaviours over and above the others, but interaction effects were non-significant for the main outcome variable measuring overall reassurance-seeking. Ancillary analyses revealed a significant three-way interaction between social anxiety symptoms, self-certainty, and post-event processing on engagement in evaluative threat-related reassurance seeking specifically. Conclusions Future prospective, naturalistic, and experimental research is needed to verify that evaluative threat-related reassurance seeking in social anxiety may be driven by heightened self-doubt and engagement in post-event processing, which may hinder socially anxious individuals from receiving high-quality support from those in their social network.