Examining the Interactions Between Subjective Social Status and Self‐Referential Processing on Social Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms in Early Adolescents

ABSTRACT Subjective social status in school (or school social status) refers to youths’ perception of their position relative to peers in school. School social status has been associated with various socio‐emotional outcomes in adolescents, such as internalizing symptoms (e.g., social anxiety and depression). Another closely related construct that undergoes significant development during adolescence is self‐referential processing, namely, the processing of information that relates to or references oneself. During adolescence, youths not only experience elevated internalizing symptoms but also become more concerned with their self‐image and are more likely to derive self‐evaluations from their social experiences with peers, for example, their social status in school. However, it remains unclear to what extent these two important social constructs, school social status and self‐referential processing, interact with each other to predict internalizing symptoms in adolescents. A community sample of one hundred fifteen 9‐ to 12‐year‐old early adolescents (66 girls, mean/SD = 11.00/1.16 years) completed an EEG self‐referent encoding task (SRET) and questionnaires on school social status and symptoms of social anxiety and depression. We found an interaction between school social status and self‐referential processing in relation to social anxiety (i.e., higher school social status predicted greater social anxiety symptoms for those with lower positive self‐referential scores), although this effect was only significant when uncorrected. There were no interactions for depressive symptoms. Our study contributed preliminary, novel evidence on the relationships between school social status, self‐referential processing, and internalizing symptoms during the transition into adolescence.