Objective: Theories assert that avoidance maintains maladaptive anxiety over time, yet a clear prospective test of this effect in the day-by-day lives of people with social anxiety disorder (SAD) is lacking.
Method: We used intensive longitudinal data to test prospective relationships between social fear and social avoidance in 32 participants with SAD who reported on a total of 4256 time points.
Results: Results suggested that avoidance strongly predicted future anxiety, but only in a minority of people with SAD. Relationships between anxiety and avoidance varied considerably across individuals. Pre-registered tests found that the strength of autocorrelation for social fear is a good target for future testing of prediction of exposure response. Participants with lower autocorrelations were less likely to show between-session habituation.
Conclusions: Overall, results suggest avoidance maintains fear in SAD for at least some individuals, but also indicates considerable variability. Further intensive longitudinal data is needed to examine individuals with SAD across varying time courses.
Keywords: avoidance; cognitive behavioral models; exposure; idiographic models; social anxiety disorder.