Study reveals age-related differences in how children with social anxiety handle errors

A new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry has uncovered a link between social anxiety and how children process their mistakes. The researchers found that younger children with more social anxiety struggled to focus their attention after making errors, while older children with social anxiety did not show the same difficulty. These findings suggest that the way social anxiety affects cognitive processes changes as children grow, which could have implications for how clinicians assess and treat anxiety in young people.

Social anxiety is a condition that causes intense fear and worry in social situations. Children and adolescents with social anxiety may be overly self-conscious, fear negative evaluation from others, and avoid social interactions. This can interfere with school, friendships, and other aspects of daily life. Anxiety disorders, including social anxiety, tend to develop early in life, which makes childhood and adolescence important periods for studying how these conditions emerge and change over time.

One area of interest in anxiety research is how people monitor and respond to their own mistakes. In adults, those with social anxiety often show heightened awareness of their errors, a process called error monitoring. However, studies have found that this pattern is not consistent across childhood. While older children and teenagers with anxiety show increased error monitoring, younger children with anxiety seem to have a reduced ability to detect their mistakes. This inconsistency led researchers to investigate another aspect of error-related cognitive processing: what happens after a mistake is made, known as post-error processing.

By studying post-error processing, the researchers aimed to better understand how children with social anxiety adjust their attention after making mistakes and whether this process changes with age. Their findings could help improve how social anxiety is assessed and treated in young people.

“This project was a really nice intersection of my research interests. Understanding how the brain course-corrects after an error and applying that to childhood and adolescence is extremely interesting to me, since the brain is developing so much during this time. Given previous research showing developmental changes in the relationship between error monitoring and anxiety, I was excited to explore similar effects in post-error processing,” said Olivia Stibolt, a PhD student at Florida International University.

The study included 214 children and adolescents between the ages of 7 and 17 who were referred to a university-based clinic specializing in child anxiety and related disorders. Of these participants, 108 met the criteria for a social anxiety diagnosis. The researchers measured social anxiety using a questionnaire called the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED), which was completed by both children and their parents.

To assess how children responded to their mistakes, the researchers used a computer-based task called the flanker task. In this task, children were shown a row of arrowheads and had to quickly indicate the direction of the center arrow while ignoring the surrounding arrows. Some trials were more difficult because the surrounding arrows pointed in the opposite direction of the center arrow. This task is commonly used to study attention and cognitive control.

The researchers focused on what happened immediately after the children made a mistake. Instead of relying on simple measures like reaction time or accuracy, they used a mathematical model called the Shrinking Spotlight Drift-Diffusion Model (SSP-DDM). This model allowed them to measure how well children focused their attention after making errors, providing a more detailed look at post-error processing than traditional methods.

The results showed a significant difference in how younger and older children with social anxiety processed their mistakes. Younger children with higher social anxiety had a harder time refocusing their attention after making an error. But this pattern changed gradually with age. At around 11 to 13 years old, the relationship between social anxiety and post-error attention difficulties seemed to disappear.

In younger children, social anxiety was linked to reduced attentional focus after errors, but by adolescence, this effect was no longer present. This suggests that as children grow and develop better cognitive control, social anxiety may no longer interfere with their ability to refocus after making mistakes.

“Among those with more social anxiety symptoms, only younger children showed less ability to focus attention after errors, while older children did not show this deficit,” Stibolt told PsyPost. “In combination with the changes in error monitoring across development that were found by previous studies, our results show that multiple stages of cognitive control (error monitoring and post-error processing) are influenced by age. These age-based differences in post-error processing highlight the importance in taking age into consideration for assessments and treatments for pediatric social anxiety.”

“The results that we found using computational modeling were not able to be seen when we analyzed more traditional behavioral indices of post-error processing, highlighting the utility of computational modeling,” Stibolt noted.

The researchers also examined whether children with social anxiety showed differences in their overall approach to decision-making, such as being more cautious in their responses. However, they found that response caution was primarily related to age, with younger children being more cautious overall, regardless of their anxiety levels.

The study provides new evidence that social anxiety affects how children process their mistakes, but that this effect changes with age. However, there are some limitations. First, because the study was cross-sectional—meaning it only looked at children at a single point in time—it cannot determine whether these changes in post-error processing are directly caused by age or whether other factors are involved. Future research should follow children over time to track how their error-processing abilities change as they grow.

Additionally, the study only examined post-error processing in a structured laboratory setting. In real-world situations, children with social anxiety may react to mistakes differently, especially in socially demanding environments. Future research could explore how social anxiety affects post-error processing in different contexts, such as during interactions with peers.

“Our long-term goals are to understand how the brain is changing during childhood and adolescence and to apply that to treatments for social anxiety,” Stibolt said.

The study, “Exploring the role of post-error processing in social anxiety across age,” was authored by Olivia A. Stibolt, Fabian A. Soto, Jeremy W. Pettit, Yasmin Rey, and George A. Buzzell.