Cultural shaping of social anxiety

In this chapter we try to place culture at the center of theory, research, and practice in understanding the nature of social anxiety. Starting with how individualism-collectivism shapes models of the self, we discuss how manifestations of social anxiety can vary across culturally divergent models of the self. We explicate the implications for potential cultural biases in the ways social anxiety is assessed and how the cognitive, emotional, and motivational components of social anxiety can diverge across these models of the self. Then we discuss the socioecological foundations of social anxiety to argue how different levels and manifestations of social anxiety can be thought of as an adaptation to the social environments we live in, depending on features of those social environments such as relational mobility levels and multiculturalism. We then focus on the factors that are particularly salient to interacting with those suffering from social anxiety disorder in a multicultural context, such as identity, intersectionality, power and privilege, discrimination and microaggressions, and cultural humility. We end the chapter by highlighting how culture should be thought of as a process that shapes social anxiety and where there are gaps in the literature in understanding this process with a call to action to our field to address these gaps to appreciably address ongoing health disparities in this area.