Exploratory study of the relationship between social anxiety, depressogenic style and coping skills in children

Literature related to the interactions between social anxiety, general anxiety, depression, attributional style, cognitive distortion, self-perceptions of social competence and coping in children is limited, although many studies have examined these variables separately. The present study examined the relationship between each of the variables and sought to determine how levels of social anxiety might impact attributional style, cognitive distortion and coping. Findings revealed that higher levels of social anxiety symptomatology were related to cognitive distortion and self-perception of social competence. Children with more social anxiety tended to display more cognitive errors and to have a lower self-perception of their acceptability with their peers. Attributional style and coping were not found to be related to social anxiety. Possible explanations for the absence of a relationship between some of the variables are discussed and areas for further research are proposed.