Performance deficits in naturalistic reading aloud are associated with social anxiety symptoms

Individuals with social anxiety exhibit biased self-evaluations in social settings, yet research remains conflicted on whether these individuals exhibit actual social performance deficits. Conflicting findings may be due to methodological differences across studies, such as the task being studied or the level of analysis at which performance deficits are measured. In the current study, we investigated whether social anxiety symptoms were associated with performance deficits in naturalistic reading aloud, examining performance at multiple levels of analysis. We recruited 58 young adults to read multi-sentence passages aloud while their audio was recorded. Audio recordings were then coded in terms of surface-level performance deficits–misproductions and hesitations in speech–at both the passage and word level. Passage-level analyses revealed social anxiety symptoms were associated with increased rates of hesitations, but not of misproductions. At the word level, social anxiety symptoms were associated with both increased hesitations and increased misproductions, dependent in the latter case upon word-level features. We also found that misproductions were positively associated with hesitations at the passage level, and were more likely to precede hesitations (as opposed to follow them) at the word level. Collectively, the results suggest that social anxiety symptoms are associated with performance deficits. Moreover, increased hesitation rates in naturalistic reading aloud may be indicative of a post-error slowing effect due to heightened self-monitoring of speech errors when reading aloud. Broadly, results demonstrate the utility of fine-grained measurement in studying social performance deficits and align with mechanistic accounts of hyperactive self-monitoring in social anxiety.