# Shame or What Makes Irrational Social Anxiety Rational

## TL;DR

This paper argues that shame plays a key role in social anxiety disorder and suggests using humor to help manage it.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel perspective on SAD by linking it to shame-proneness and proposes humor as a treatment supplement.

## Key findings

- Shame is modeled as a key driver of irrational social anxiety due to its aversive and unpredictable nature.
- Evidence supports the link between shame-proneness and socially prescribed perfectionism in SAD.
- Humor is proposed as a potential tool to improve self-regulation in managing shame.

## Abstract

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is defined as a pathological fear of social interactions in which an individual may be negatively evaluated by others. The crucial component of assessing the state as clinical is the ‘context-insensitivity’ of the fear—i.e., the negative evaluation does not have any tangible repercussions, or the evaluation is not as detrimentally negative, as the patient presumes. However, this model excludes the role of self-conscious emotions, specifically shame, in aggravating social fears. This article models shame as an emotion that is highly aversive, unpredictable, and resistant to metacognitive regulation, which entails a perspective that SAD is the product of high shame-proneness and the inability to voluntarily mitigate it. The evidence of mutual correlates, such as socially prescribed perfectionism and treatment outcomes of cognitive and behavioral therapeutic modalities, is used to justify the argument. The article suggests the possibility of implementing humor as a supplement to a standard SAD-treatment self-regulation strategy that would allow subjects to control the emergence of their shame more efficiently. Finally, a potential randomized control trial study design is proposed to test the perspective outlined.