Social Negative Affect and Social Disengagement: Unique and Interacting Effects on Social Dysfunction Transdiagnostically

Prior research indicates that social functioning is impacted by both social engagement and affective experience regarding social interactions. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which each component, as well as their interaction, contributes to social dysfunction in a combined nonclinical and transdiagnostic psychiatric sample. A sample of young adults (n=144) spanning the social dysfunction spectrum completed measures that capture different forms of psychopathology relevant to social dysfunction, from which two dimensions – namely Social Negative Affect (SNA) and Social Disengagement (SD) – were extracted using Principal Components Analysis. Participants additionally completed a variety of clinician-rated and self-reported social functioning measures that were aggregated into one overall social functioning score. Hierarchical regression was used to examine the unique contribution of SNA and SD and their interaction on overall social functioning. SNA and SD explained unique variance (Δr2=46.3%), indicating that elevated SNA and SD levels predicted worse social functioning. The SNA-by-SD interaction was positive and explained significant additional amounts of variance (Δr2=2.9%), indicating a less-than-additive effect on social dysfunction. These effects remained significant after controlling for intellectual functioning. The findings suggest that examining social behaviors and affect simultaneously is important for understanding social functional outcomes in clinical populations.