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Adult - Anxiety

Rates of Social Anxiety Following COVID-19 Differentially Increased in Non-Heterosexual Compared with Heterosexual Individuals

(PS2-35) Rates of Social Anxiety Following COVID-19 Differentially Increased in Non-heterosexual Compared with Heterosexual Individuals

Friday, November 15, 2024
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM EST
Location: Franklin Hall, Level 4, Marriott Downtown
Abstract Text: Rates of social anxiety have increased following the height of COVID-19 (Kindred & Bates, 2023). This increase has been hypothesized to be partially due to reduced social exposure (Arad et al., 2021), which could also be associated with inhibited feelings of social connectedness. Within the LGBTQ2+ community, social connectedness protects against feelings of distress (Puckett et al., 2015). Furthermore, non-heterosexual individuals, who make up a subset of the LGBTQ2+ community, experience more social anxiety symptoms and have higher rates of social anxiety disorder compared to heterosexual individuals in pre-pandemic samples (see Mahon et al., 2022). Past research has not assessed whether social anxiety increased more in non-heterosexual individuals following the pandemic. The present study assessed six large samples of undergraduate students between 2019-2024, comparing the proportion of non-heterosexual versus heterosexual students who were classified as high social anxiety within each semester from pre- to post-pandemic. High social anxiety was determined using combined cutoff scores on one measure of social anxiety symptoms and one of impairment (Kudryk et al., under review). Contrary to past findings, results indicated that pre-pandemic, between Jan-Apr of 2019, there were no differences between non-heterosexual (n = 500) and heterosexual (n = 1504) students in the proportion of those classified as high social anxiety (X2 = 1.583, p = .208). In the post-pandemic samples, however, there were significantly more non-heterosexual, compared to heterosexual, students classified as high social anxiety within all samples (i.e., Jan-Apr 2022 [X2 = 8.300, p = .004], Sept-Dec 2022 [X2 = 18.924, p < .001], Jan-Apr 2023 [X2 = 17.039, p < . 001], Sept-Dec 2023 [X2 =18.365, p < .001], Jan-Mar 2024 [X2 = 9.83, p = .002]). Descriptive statistics across semesters further demonstrated that high social anxiety classification from pre- to post-pandemic (i.e., 2019 to 2022) more steeply increased in non-heterosexual students (21.5% increase) compared to heterosexual students (15.6% increase). At the time of presentation, we will also share data that are currently being collected on the prevalence of post-pandemic diagnoses of social anxiety disorder in heterosexual versus non-heterosexual individuals in a clinical community-based sample. Together, our findings so far suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic differentially and negatively impacted non-heterosexual students regarding their experiences of social anxiety symptoms and impairment. This builds on past research that found similar results in other minority groups (i.e., women and low-income individuals; Kindred & Bates, 2023), suggesting that factors related to minority stress in sexual minorities (e.g., heterosexist discrimination, internalized homonegativity) may have contributed to rises in social anxiety and should be more carefully considered during treatment of social anxiety disorder.