Mediators and moderators of the relation between social anxiety symptoms and positive emotions: a comparison of two reminiscence strategies

Social anxiety is associated with diminished ability to savour positive emotions. This study tested whether three constructs associated with social anxiety: experiential avoidance, fear of positive evaluation, and fear of positive emotion, mediated the relation between social anxiety and increases in positive emotions following a reminiscence savouring task. The study also tested whether visual perspective adopted during reminiscence moderated these relationships. 196 college student participants were asked to reminisce from an immersed, first-person visual perspective or a distanced, third-person visual perspective. In line with hypotheses, greater social anxiety predicted greater experiential avoidance, which predicted smaller increases in positive emotions in the immersed, but not distanced, condition. There was no moderated mediation effect for fear of positive emotion. Contrary to expectations, fear of positive evaluation was associated with greater increases in positive emotions in the immersed condition, but lower increases in the distanced condition. Findings suggest that social anxiety led to diminished reminiscence benefits through different mechanisms, which differentially interact with savouring strategies to influence positive emotions.