Handbook of Social and Evaluation Anxiety

For a long time I have wanted to put together a book about sodal and evaluation anxiety. Sodal-evaluation anxiety seemed to be a stressful part of so many people's everyday experience. It also seemed to be apart of so many of the clinical problems that I worked with. Common terms that fit under this rubric include fears of rejection, humiliation, critidsm, embarrassment, ridicule, failure, and abandonment. Examples of sodal and evaluation anxiety include shyness; sodal inhibition; sodal timidity; public speaking anxiety; feelings of self-consdousness and awkwardness in sodal situations; test anxiety; perfor mance anxiety in sports, theater, dance, or music; shame; guilt; separation anx iety; sodal withdrawal; procrastination; and fear of job interviews or job evalua tions, of asking someone out, of not making a good impression, or of appearing stupid, foolish, or physically unattractive. In its extreme form, sodal anxiety is a behavior disorder in its own right sodal phobia. Thisinvolves not only feelings of anxiety but also avoidance and withdrawal from sodal situations in which scrutiny and negative evaluation are antidpated. Sodal-evaluation anxiety also plays a role in other clinical disorders. For example, people with agoraphobia are afraid of having a panic attack in public in part because they fear making a spectacle of themselves. Moreover, even their dominant terrors of going crazy or having a heart attack seem to reflect a central concern with sodal abandonment and isolation.