Social anxiety with peers in 9-to 14-year-olds. Developmental process and relations with self-counsciousness and perceived peer acceptance

Social anxiety in the peer groups is currently viewed as typical of early a dolescence. This awkwardness with peers is supposedly a consequence of the of the multiple changes occuring during this period. Nevertheless, empirica l evidence regarding the development of social anxiety with peers, as well as its psychological correlates, is scarce. To shed light on these issues, a total of 508 French fourth-to-ninth-graders completed questionnaires asse ssing their perception of social anxiety with peers. They assessed also var ious aspects of their self-consciousness and perceived peer acceptance, bec ause we hypothesized that these two social cognitive dimensions were correl ated - positively and negatively respectively - with social anxiety. Within each of these three general domains, several more specific variables were considered. Specifically, inward and outward self-consciousness were distin guished Overall, a decreasing tendency with age was observed for social anx iety and inward self-consciousness, although the participants increasingly perceived themselves to be neglected by their peers. Correlational analyses suggested that inward self-consciousness, outward self-consciousness, and perceived peer acceptance contribute independently to social anxiety.