Early maladaptive schemas and social anxiety in adolescents: The mediating role of anxious automatic thoughts

Highlights • This is the first multiwave longitudinal study to examine the role of early maladaptive schemas in the prediction of social anxiety symptoms. • Deeper schemas predict more surface-level anxious thoughts and these, in turn, contribute to perpetuating schemas. • Automatic thoughts mediate the predictive association among schemas and social anxiety. • Early maladaptive schemas of the other-directedness domain play a key role in social anxiety. • The study has implications for the theory as it supports a hierarchical structure of cognitions.