Social anxiety in ASD

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J Autism Dev Disord. 2020 May 14. doi: 10.1007/s10803-020-04529-w. [Epub ahead of print]
Brief Report: Social Anxiety in Autism Spectrum Disorder is Based on Deficits in Social Competence.
Espelöer J1, Hellmich M2, Vogeley K3, Falter-Wagner CM4,5,6.
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Abstract

This study differentially examined the relation between two clinical constructs: "social anxiety" and "social competence" in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Employing two questionnaires (SASKO; IU), individuals with ASD (n = 23) showed increased scores of SOCIAL ANXIETY (SASKO) and of INTOLERANCE OF UNCERTAINTY (IU), compared to a non-clinical comparison group (NC; n = 25). SOCIAL ANXIETY scores were equally increased for ASD and a reference population of individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD; n = 68). However, results showed increased SOCIAL COMPETENCE DEFICITS in ASD compared to SAD and NC groups. This study allows drawing the conclusion that social anxiety symptoms in ASD can be traced back to autism-specific deficits in social skills and are therefore putatively based on different, substantially "deeper" implemented cognitive mechanisms.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/324 ... t=Abstract

Full text: https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 20-04529-w

TLDR: Comparing ASD to social anxiety (SAD) and non-clinical controls.
They found out: ASD people are just anxious in social situations as people with SAD but they are significantly less socially competent in both speaking and obtaining information.
The authors speculate that social incompetence is fundamental and fear of rejection is a "surface" symptom in ASD cases.
They propose to use it to differentiate social anxiety in ASD from "regular" social anxiety.

^ Thanks for providing the full text.

I love how these studies just explain what we already know.

must validate these things with a study......uhm..? looolz

Not everyone knows what you know . It's not just about what you know or don't know .

Indeed. These things may be obvious to us, but we need to prove that they’re true in case people don’t believe us, so it’s good that the research is done.

The only reason I have anxiety is because I feel people would pickup on my awkwardness or Autism in general.

I don't want to knock it too much, but it does seem a tad annoying that they didn't ask us - though maybe that's in the main body of the paper somewhere. It's comforting to know, at least, that they're saying something about us that we'd often agree with. Better than that stuff about us being zero-morality or whatever it was.

Almost goes without saying that our social anxiety is grounded in realistic thinking. Either we remember embarrassing social gaffes, or we simply don't know how others view us, which is enough to make anybody anxious. The feedback that NTs mysteriously divine from reading between the lines and observing body language is frequently unavailable to us.

Zero empathy, that was it.

I think it's so cruel that we can have autism as well as social anxiety, because you're more likely to be afraid of yourself and may never accept yourself.

I have social anxiety when I'm out in public, and what people think of me is important to me, and if I feel like people are judging me it brings me down. I just have a fear of being judged. And fancy having a fear of being judged when you have autism. You'd have thought autism = unawareness.

When I lived in Southend ,which is much larger population wise than where I am now, I was very conscious about people picking up on any strange mannerisms I'd involuntarily display .

"dance like you have no cares" "judge not lest ye be judged." just tibits of sayings have over heard over the years.

Good advice if you can do it. Me, although I have a healthy disrespect for what people might think of me, and would defend with my dying breath the individual's right to do whatever they liked as long as it was harmless, I can't seem to shake the feeling that I need to avoid doing anything that would go down badly. The exception is when I think they've got some daft prejudice or other that angers me. In that case I might well do something just to show them we don't all cow-tow to their nonsense. But otherwise, I'm usually sensitive to looking stupid, mean, uncaring, or weird. I don't get particularly fraught or anxious about it, I just habitually keep a strong check on my behaviour (least said, soonest mended), and I keep getting the feeling that I might have unwittingly annoyed whoever I've been around. If only people would come clean about what they think of each other more often and just say when I've hurt their feelings or otherwise annoyed or scared them, I'd probably feel a lot more confident in their company, but I've seen how they can pretend everything's fine until a person isn't around, and how they can then start to find fault with them behind their back, and I've noticed that even people who don't backbite like that can get upset about somebody's behaviour but fail to challenge them until they can't stand it any more.