Project description
Decoding social anxiety in real life
Social anxiety shapes how individuals communicate and regulate their emotions. Yet little is known about how this impacts everyday social situations. The ERC-funded SocialDynamics project studies how people with social anxiety communicate and control their emotions during real-life social interactions. It will examine both how socially anxious individuals interact with one another and how they regulate the emotions that arise during these exchanges. By measuring brain activity while people are interacting, the project aims to better understand how social anxiety impacts the ability to deal with social situations. The goal is to identify brain patterns behind social anxiety to understand why social encounters can be especially challenging for certain people.
Objective
Social anxiety (SA) has a profound impact on social functioning, but there is limited understanding of how SA individuals navigate the challenges of everyday social situations. These challenges consist of deciding how to communicate with others and how to regulate emotions evoked by those interactions, often under time-pressure and swiftly changing demands. Yet, the field has largely neglected the dynamic and socially interactive character of the challenges faced by SA individuals.
This project builds on my conceptual innovation: SA should be studied where it matters most, during dynamic social interactions, considering emotion regulation decisions. It also builds on my methodological expertise: measuring neural dynamics during communication. These innovative backgrounds allow me to now develop a new neurocognitive framework for understanding the challenges SA individuals face when dealing with the communicative and emotional demands of social interactions.
I will test how SA pairs solve communicative problems under evaluative pressure, while brain activity in each pair is simultaneously measured (WP1). I will use advanced methods to quantify of how pairs use their shared history to explore novel solutions to the communicative challenge. Further, I will identify neural systems supporting the selection of strategies to regulate emotions evoked by social stimuli (WP2). Casting emotion regulation as a dynamic decision-making problem between regulatory strategies moves the field beyond current SA research on the (in)ability to execute a single strategy. Finally, I will test whether difficulties to flexibly deal with communicative (WP1) and emotion regulation (WP2) demands in social settings can be explained by rigidity to adjust behaviour in unpredictable environments (WP3). Explaining the social challenges that SA individuals face in daily live will move the field beyond traditional approaches unable to capture the dynamics of typically changing social situations.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
6525 XZ Nijmegen
Netherlands
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