Understanding Social Anxiety Disorder among Chinese College Students: Evidence from UIC Students

Chen Chaofan, Frank

Introduction

In recent years, China’s psychological clinic service’s advancement has helped diagnose and destigmatise psychological illnesses that were once considered personal flaws or abnormalities. However, the pressures of modern society and technological advancement have exacerbated issues like social anxiety disorder (SAD) in younger generations, who face multidimensional stressors from family, academic competition, and job-finding hardship.

This paper, along with the previous group presentation, focuses on social anxiety disorder (SAD), a widely prevalent but often overlooked psychological issue among Chinese college students compared with diseases such as depression or bipolar disorder. Through an analysis of existing literature and a survey conducted among dozens of UIC students by our group, this paper aims to examine SAD’s influence on Chinese college students.

Literature Review

College students’ Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) has been discussed by many scholars nowadays for mainly threefold reasons. First, society has cognised college period is crucial for youths’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioural development. Second, SAD is an interpersonal communication disorder that might adversely impact college students’ academic and social lives (Pan et al., 2018). Finally, SAD was misperceived as mere shyness (Rozen & Aderka, 2021), which could lead to severe psychological problems (Aune et al., 2022).

Research on college students’ SAD globally and locally reveals several surprising statistics. According to Lai et al. (2023), 7-33% of college students suffer from SAD globally, while 12-14% of Chinese college students experience high-level SAD. Additionally, Meng et al. (2021) reported that 33.38% of Chinese college students have experienced at least one SAD symptom, while Zhao and Dai (2016) found that 22.4% are experiencing moderate to severe SAD. These facts are astonishing and call for further study and attention on the SAD issues among college students.

As we talk about the SAD’s severity, we need to be clear about the causation of it from multiple perspectives. Lai et al. (2023) found that SAD is affected by gender, family income (socio-economic status), childhood experiences, frustrated social interactions and personality traits. Lee et al. (2022) looked deeper and saw that overthinking might influence SAD, which means persistent self-read negativity (e.g., negative evaluation from self and others) could lead to SAD. With the development of technology, smartphone use might also worsen SAD by laying interdependence and behavioural cues to someone’s psychological issues (Gao et al., 2016).

Case Study: SAD among UIC Students

 In order to examine the situation of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) in the UIC community, my team established a questionnaire to ask for students’ experiences and thoughts on SAD. With 69 valid responses, only 17 consider themselves people without SAD or related experiences. It shows that many students can recognise their emotions well, which is comforting and could thank to psychological knowledge popularisation. The result of rating the SAD’s influences over your life also represents students’ optimism towards SAD: the average score of SAD’s influences is 2.34 (0 means no influence and vice versa for 5). This shows that students at UIC have mostly experienced SAD, and they are optimistic about its influences on their life.

As we asked for opinions on potential factors that might impact the SAD, UIC students tend to conclude it is “a matter of personal character” (62.32%) and “environmental issues” (14.49%). Some of them detailedly explain the reasons for “less incentive for going out existing social comfort zone”, “do not want to be focused on social activities”, “not confident enough”, and “distrust of others”. Other survey-offered options like “family factors”, “social factors”, and “appearance issues” are less addressed by respondents. This might be reasonable given that UIC is an international community where the culture is more inclusive, and it is a college that needs to pay comparatively high tuition fees, which could explain the low influence on family factors (socio-economic situations).

Besides asking for a general feeling on the SAD in students’ life, we have added a variant of smartphone use in the poll to determine whether there is relevance between smartphone use and SAD. We add the smartphone as an influential factor because it has significantly changed our social mode to online, which means people can communicate without any physical connections. The result is interesting, it shows the de facto connection between smartphone use and SAD by a negative relevance. Students who use smartphones to communicate are likelier to have SAD issues and vice versa.

Conclusion and Discussion

With the advancement of current society, we have a deeper understanding and acceptance of psychological illnesses by de-stigmatizing people who suffer from psychological illnesses. However, some of the issues have been well-addressed, while some others are still being overlooked, like Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), which is a prevalent psychological issue among college students that is being discovered and discussed by many researchers. This paper has made a sharp taste to understanding SAD among college students.

First, we found that many college students suffer from SAD at different levels from both literature and the survey done at UIC, which shows SAD is a widely popular psychological issue among college communities. Secondly, we have found that the causes of SAD are diverse; it includes the factors of personality, social and family factors, gender and so forth. Among these indicators, personality traits were the most commonly reported cause from UIC’s poll result. Thirdly, we discovered that smartphone use, which represents the social activity approach in the digital era, negatively influences causing SAD among college students. These findings highlight the importance of addressing and destigmatising SAD among college students.

This paper indicates that college students have a commendable level of psychological literacy, as evidenced by the high SAD self-reporting rate at UIC. Students can help each other to tackle SAD and its potential negative influences by organising activities to share successful experiences. Universities should also consider SAD as a possible catalyst for other severe psychological diseases (e.g., depression) and work towards creating an inclusive environment. UIC’s Emotional Intelligence course is a good try. Society must also support individuals with SAD by making social well-being policies and increasing social services, particularly for college students. However, establishing a supportive environment for those with SAD and other mental illnesses remains a long way.

Reference

Aune, T., Nordahl, H. M., & Beidel, D. C. (2022). Social anxiety disorder in adolescents: Prevalence and subtypes in the Young-HUNT3 study. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 87, 102546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2022.102546

Gao, Y., Li, A., Zhu, T., Liu, X., & Liu, X. (2016). How smartphone usage correlates with social anxiety and loneliness. PeerJ, 2016(7), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2197

Lai, F., Wang, L., Zhang, J., Shan, S., Chen, J., & Tian, L. (2023). Relationship between Social Media Use and Social Anxiety in College Students: Mediation Effect of Communication Capacity. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(4), 3657. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20043657

Lee, J., Waldeck, D., Holliman, A. J., Banerjee, M., & Tyndall, I. (2022). Feeling Socially Anxious at University: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Qualitative Report, 27(4), 897–919. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5270

Meng, T., He, Y., Zhang, Q., Yu, F., Zhao, L., Zhang, S., Chen, Z., Wang, S., Gong, J., & Liu, J. (2021). Analysis of features of social anxiety and exploring the relationship between childhood major adverse experiences and social anxiety in early adulthood among Chinese college students. Journal of Affective Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.05.105

Pan, Z., Zhang, D., Hu, T., & Pan, Y. (2018). The relationship between psychological Suzhi and social anxiety among Chinese adolescents: the mediating role of self-esteem and sense of security. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13034-018-0255-y

Rozen, N., & Aderka, I. M. (2021). The effect of depression on treatment outcome in social anxiety disorder: an individual-level meta-analysis. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 51(3), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2021.1966089

Zhao, C., & Dai, B. (2016). Relationship of Fear of Negative Evaluation and Social Anxiety in College Students. China Journal of Health Psychology, 24(11), 1746–1749. https://doi.org/10.13342/j.cnki.cjhp.2016.11.038

This is a course essay for SOC 1133 Youth and Social Well-Being, the instructor is Dr Nina NING Xuan.