Learning disorder or social anxiety? New study finds social anxiety impairs classroom performance

A recent study performed at the University of Minnesota’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Minnesota found that social anxiety in children could be causing impaired classroom performance.

It has long been understood that social anxiety impairs social functioning, but this study sought to look for any links between social anxiety and academic performance. Because researchers wanted to study the children in a non-clinical environment, the children were found and diagnosed through school-wide screenings and follow-up diagnostic interviews.

Researchers analyzed the types of fears, severity of fears, social situations avoided, interpersonal relationships and ability to function in the classroom of each child. The children with social anxiety were also compared to children who were identified as anxious without social anxiety in each of these categories and analyzed for any other emotional disorders to determine differences in outcomes.

As expected, the results showed that children with social anxiety experienced fear and avoidance in a significantly higher number of social situations than children who did not experience social anxiety. They were also found to be much more likely to experience difficulty making friends and spend more time alone than children who did not have a social phobia.

The most interesting study result, though, was the discovery that the children with social anxiety appeared to be much more likely to have poor leadership skills, greater difficulty paying attention, and more significant learning problems in a classroom setting. The degree to which each socially anxious child experienced these problems was shown to be more severe at greater levels of social anxiety, pointing to a direct relationship between intensity of social anxiety and the level of learning impairment.

This is a preliminary study, meaning that much more research is needed to determine why there appears to be such a strong correlation between social anxiety and learning problems in a classroom setting. The researchers who performed the study stress that greater understanding, diagnosis and treatment of social anxiety disorder is more important in light of these findings. Because the study was done on the effects of social anxiety on a child’s ability to learn in the classroom, it is likely that the link has little to do with intelligence. Instead, it is most likely that the child doesn’t feel comfortable in group learning environments. If social anxiety is impairing a child’s ability to learn, he or she may experience greater difficulty later in life with continuing education, finding employment opportunities, and even higher levels of social anxiety.

© Copyright 2007 Insight Journal Online Magazine.

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