Examining Racial Group Differences in the Relationship Between Social Anxiety and Self-Concealment

Social anxiety is associated with the use of safety behaviors, including self-concealment, which involves actively hiding personally distressing information from others to avoid social scrutiny. Cultural group membership may shape this relationship, as research suggests that Asian-descent individuals report higher social anxiety and endorse stronger emotion control values than white individuals on average. However, no known research has examined whether cultural group moderates the relationship between social anxiety severity and self-concealment. The present study examined two aims using data from 328 undergraduate students (n = 270 white; n = 58 Asian-descent) recruited at a private Midwestern university in fall 2005. The first aim tested whether Asian-descent and white participants differed in self-concealment levels. The second aim examined whether cultural group membership moderated the relationship between social anxiety severity and self-concealment. Self-concealment was measured using a composite score derived from the personal concealment subscale of the Self-Concealment Scale and the hidden self subscale of the Core Extrusion Schema. Social anxiety was measured using the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale. Results indicated that Asian-descent participants reported modestly higher self-concealment than white participants, though this difference was not statistically significant, t(325) = -0.550, p = .583, d = -0.08. A multiple regression moderation analysis revealed that social anxiety severity was a significant positive predictor of self-concealment, β = .683, p < .001, accounting for substantial variance in concealment scores, R² = .47, F(3, 320) = 94.60, p < .001. However, cultural group did not significantly moderate the relationship between social anxiety and self-concealment, β = -.045, p = .274. These findings suggest that social anxiety robustly predicts self-concealment regardless of cultural group membership, though the null moderation result may reflect limitations in how cultural group was operationalized rather than a true absence of moderation. Future research should incorporate more precise measures of cultural orientation, including acculturation level and collectivist values, and recruit larger samples of Asian-descent participants to more rigorously test the role of culture in the social anxiety and self-concealment relationship