Social Anxiety In The Military

How is being in the military and having been deployed related to social anxiety than in those that have not.
The purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between deployment and social anxiety. “In social anxiety disorder (social phobia), the individual is fearful, anxious about or avoidant of social interactions and situations that involve the possibility of being scrutinized” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013 p. 190). In other words, people with social anxiety disorder feel afraid of being embarrassed, or rejected. This is important because we know that social anxiety is related to suicidal behaviors, decrease in life satisfaction and quality of life. According to Stein and Kean (2000), individuals with social phobia (social
One of the problem areas is social functioning (Hofmann, Litz, &Weathers, 2003). For retiring veterans transitioning into civilian life can be difficult for those who have served (Hatch, Harvey, Dandeker, Burdett, H., Greenberg, Fear, & Wessely, 2013). Veterans have a hard time reconnecting and adjusting with the world after returning home, and this can lead to PTSD and other mental health problems that limit them from engaging in normal life activities. This includes having less fulfilled relationships, social connections that tend to be conflicted, they have less emotional connections, and issues with intimacy and positive sharing (Kashdan, Frueh, Knapp, Hebert, & Magruder, 2006). When an individual experiences social anxiety it leads to avoidant behavior, actions and withdraw to prevent consequences from occurring (Clark & Wells, 1995). Avoidant behavior is a temporary protection for the individual in that giving moment, but it interferes with the psychological benefits that having a social environment can provide (Kashdan, Julian, Merritt, & Uswatte,
People who have social phobia enter peer situations with anxiety; they are afraid the assumption they have created about their self will cause them to feel inferior to others. According to Clark’s research (2001), he investigated how students with different levels of social anxiety, perceived how they think someone would describe them after meeting them, how they would describe their self after meeting new people and how they would describe a stranger. His results show that those students with higher levels of anxiety recalled fewer positive words, and those with lower levels of anxiety recalled a higher number of positive words (Clark, 2001). Clark also found that participants who are more anxious often think about times when they failed a difficult social task. When individuals fail socially it makes them fear what they will say and how others will perceive them at their next social encounter. Often times when veterans return from a deployment, they can fall into low life satisfaction and start to question their old life and the way others perceive