Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a prevalent disorder marked by significant impairment. Advancing our understanding of the disorder is important to prevention and treatment of SAD. Formal diagnostic criteria and traditional accounts of SAD highlight the feature of avoidance; however, this depiction of SAD minimizes the full spectrum of responses to social anxiety. If humans are evolutionarily prepared to face perceived threat with a "flight or fight" response, it seems reasonable to assume that the entire nature of this response should be observed in clinical manifestations of anxiety. Following work by Kashdan and colleagues (Kashdan, Elhai, & Breen, 2008; Kashdan & Hoffman, 2008; Kashdan, McKnight, Richey, & Hoffman, 2009), this study directly examined this confrontational side of responses in social anxiety, specifically aggression, in a sample of socially anxious college students. Two hundred twenty-one students who exhibited high scores on two measures of social anxiety were subjected to a paradigm in which they were asked to make decisions ostensibly related to painful tasks and hurtful ratings of partners in the study. In order to increase the likelihood of aggressive responding, half of the participants were told that the study was investigating leadership skills, and their leadership skills were called into question. All participants received measures of symptoms/traits thought to relate to aggressive responding; a component score was derived from these measures to aid in the detection of participants most likely to aggress. Results showed that some participants did display aggressive responding in the study. Direct aggression was predicted by a three-way interaction between component score, experimental manipulation, and sex, and approximately 16-22% of the sample displayed high levels of aggression on the various tasks measuring direct aggression. Traits of paranoia, psychopathy, and borderline personality were most related to direct aggression. Indirect aggression was predicted by component score, and 21.27% of the sample displayed high levels of indirect aggression. Traits of paranoia were most related to indirect aggression. Self-reported aggression was predicted by component score and gender, and 7.78% of males in the sample and 14.50% of females in the sample reported high levels of self-reported aggression. Traits of paranoia, psychopathy, and depressive personality were most related to self-reported aggression. These patterns of results were not, however, mediated by beliefs about the status enhancement potential of aggression. The results, as a whole, support prior findings of atypical responses to social anxiety and suggest that some social anxious individuals may respond with aggression rather than prototypical avoidance.
