In an anxious state (and we are talking about ordinary everyday anxiety, and not about something more serious), we almost stop paying attention to others. We are only concerned with how and what we could say (do) wrong.
“When we are anxious, the field of attention narrows. It’s like you’re going inward and trying to answer questions like, “Did they like me?”, “Am I a good person at all?” says Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School and one of the co-authors of the new study. dedicated to this issue. By focusing on ourselves, we pay less attention to the people around us. In support of this, Galinsky conducted six experiments involving 135 people (1). The participants were divided into three groups: the first two wrote a case from life in which they experienced, respectively, anxiety and anger (the task is to evoke these emotions in them). The third group was given a neutral task – to describe how they usually spend the evening.
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Participants were then shown a photograph of a man sitting at a table, facing the camera. There was a book on the table: in relation to the person in the photograph, it was on the left, in relation to the viewer, on the right. The subjects were asked which side of the table it lies on. 72% of those who were put into a state of anxiety answered that they were on the right. In other groups, 40-50% gave this answer. Researchers believe that in a state of anxiety, it is more difficult for a person to look at the situation through the eyes of another. This conclusion is also confirmed in other similar experiments.
The question arises – where is the cause, and where is the effect. Do we lock ourselves in because of anxiety, or, on the contrary, is anxiety the root cause? Canadian scientists conducted a study in 2012 and concluded that the second assumption is true (2). They studied patients suffering from social phobia. During the experiment, the subjects who were asked to focus on themselves during communication, the next day, were more worried about how the conversation went than those who were asked to focus on the interlocutor. The authors believe that all of us should pay attention to their recommendations: during a conversation, it is better to focus less on yourself and more on the interlocutor.
1. А. Todd et al. «Anxious and egocentric: How specific emotions influence perspective taking», Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2015, vol. 144, №2.
2. D. Gaydukevych, N. Kocovski «Effect of self-focused attention on post-event processing in social anxiety», Behavior Research and Therapy, № 50.