Anxiety
Can Social Anxiety Make Us Better at Reading Minds?
It depends on the depth of egocentrism and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty.
Posted February 2, 2025 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Here is a riddle:
I come in darkness, but fill the mind with light. I can bring just as likely fear as delight. What am I?
“Worrying is like paying interest on a debt you don’t owe,” wrote the journalist Harry A. Thompson in his Cynic’s Dictionary. It feels like riding a hamster wheel leading nowhere while leaving the fearful mind exhausted. However, what if overthinking the other person’s intentions, desires, and motives could in exchange make us more attuned to their mental universe? After all, the hamsters who rode the wheels daily were shown to have enhanced well-being and less stereotypical or escapist behaviors compared to the ones who did not have such an opportunity. It is plausible that ruminating about what others think or feel might eventually pay off, leading to enhanced social connectedness.
The ability to understand other minds, also known as Theory of Mind (ToM) or mentalizing represents an essential ingredient for navigating social environments and for decoding the mental lives of people around us based on the often ambiguous cues that they offer.
By definition, anxiety is a future-oriented emotion characterized by negative valence, high arousal, and an (aversive) experience of enhanced uncertainty. "The unknown awakens in us a reptilian dread that plays out with the same ferocity on scales personal, societal, and civilizational, whether triggered by a new life chapter or a new political regime or a new world order," described Maria Popova in her Figuring.
High social anxiety can trigger a “hyperactive ToM”, an over-mentalization, making one attribute more intense emotions and greater meaning to what for example the characters in a movie are thinking, feeling, and intending. Patients with social anxiety disorder in some studies showed what appeared to be an enhanced cognitive empathy, but had lower accuracy on ToM tasks asking them to infer emotions from movies or in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.
The authors suggest that socially anxious people seem to work in the opposite direction of people with autism spectrum conditions whose inferences about the mental states of other people are absent or very limited – however, they are not necessarily more successful at actually reading other minds. How can this apparent paradox be explained?
Interestingly, even in a non-social context, while anxiety conjures an imaginary external threat, it generates an enhanced egocentrism, a biased tendency to prioritize one’s own perspective in inferring the thoughts, feelings, and preferences of another. This effect was evident across various studies summarized by Andrew Todd and collaborators, indicating that inducing higher state anxiety (compared to a neutral or angry state) made people more likely to describe an object using their own spatial perspective and to rely more heavily on knowledge that only they possessed in inferring other people’s perspectives. Most importantly, they found that it was their experience of enhanced uncertainty, and not simply greater arousal which explained this egocentric tendency.
An interesting line of studies (though not fully replicated) showed that existential threats such as reminders of one’s own mortality (being questioned in front of a funeral home) made those Americans who believed Christian values should be taught in schools and those Germans who believed the Constitution should restrict the immigration of foreigners believe that more of their fellow citizens share such minority views, thus again inferring more consensus with their anxiety-primed perspective. The terror management theory proposes that our cultural worldviews are shaped by our perceived vulnerabilities and buffered by our delusions of consensual validation. Translated to the social reality, and echoing the song Imitosis by Andrew Bird, “That what's mistaken for closeness is just a case of mitosis”, this multiplication and projection of one’s own world views upon the world makes it feel like a safer, more comprehensible place.
Reasoning in an egocentric manner about the social world is a normative hallmark of childhood, so a natural question arises whether anxious children would show an even stronger deficit in their mind reading abilities. Our study tested constructive ToM, namely the ability to understand that knowledge can be differently built across individuals with different life experiences or different information available.
Children with higher anxiety symptoms and with a greater tendency to generate anxiety-biased interpretations were rated by their parents as having a lower ToM. This was confirmed by their lower performance in the constructive ToM task where they had to give multiple interpretations to the same ambiguous situation.
To sum up, across the lifespan, social anxiety appears to induce a non-accurate subjective feeling of increased similarity with other minds, which actually limits further probing and checking if such hypotheses are valid – especially by the feared otherness. Another possibility is that in the face of ambiguity, the anxious mind just shrugs and decides that it is impossible to fully comprehend other minds, therefore the quest for connectedness is a lost battle from the start. Again this thinking fallacy could promote egocentric biases and further increase the feelings of uncertainty.
How can we reduce this biased egocentric thinking which seems to naturally derive from anxiety and further reinforce it? Training our ToM relies on opening up the internal mind decoder by asking more questions, checking our interpretations with others, and understanding that the way they see the world could fundamentally differ from ours. In this way, we could develop what Colin MacLeod and his team at University of Western Australia investigate as productive worries, which increase involvement in dealing with more controllable threats and could result in a greater tolerance of uncertainty.
“Let everything happen to you / Beauty and terror / Just keep going / No feeling is final” would be a good starting point (similar to the openness towards experience that we have in dreams, even when they bring fears or delights, as our riddle suggests), although this might ask the socially fearful mind to "Go to the Limits of your Longing" (Rainer Maria Rilke).
Answer to the Riddle: A dream.
References
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