(PS1-68) Understanding the Roles of Worry and Social Conflict in Future Social Avoidance

Social conflict may result in social avoidance and negative emotions, such as worry. This relationship may play a critical role in the development and maintenance of anxiety-related disorders.Longitudinal data is needed to examine the time course of the impact of social conflict and worry on future social avoidance. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) offers a context-specific approach to examining whether worry and social conflict interact to predict future social avoidance in real-time; in the current study, we investigated their momentary impact on social avoidance. We hypothesized that greater social conflict would predict subsequent increases in self-reported social avoidance and that worry would moderate the relationship between social conflict and future social avoidance. We recruited 437 undergraduate students who primarily identified as racially/ethnically diverse and self-identified as female (80%) We asked participants to complete 5 surveys every day for two weeks using a smartphone app. EMA assessments asked participants to rate how much they experienced each item since the last assessment on a 0 (“not at all”) to 100 (“extremely”) sliding scale (Fisher et al., 2017). To analyze the data we used linear multilevel models using restricted maximum likelihood (REML) and compared two models: a main effects model assessing effects of social conflict and worry on social avoidance, and an interactive model testing whether the relationship between social conflict and social avoidance was moderated by worry. Both models included random intercepts and slopes for time, nested within participants, to account for individual variability and repeated measures. The results indicate that both social conflict and worry were significant predictors of social avoidance over time. In the main effects model, higher levels of conflict (B = 0.11, p < .001) and worry (B = .07, p < .001) were associated with greater social avoidance in subsequent assessments. Random effects revealed substantial variation in social avoidance between individuals (SD = 12.23) and across timepoints (SD = 3.86). In the second model, the interaction between conflict and worry (B = 0.0004, p =.060) was not statistically significant, suggesting that the relationship between conflict and social avoidance is not moderated by worry. Adding the interaction term between conflict and worry in the interaction model did not significantly improve model fit (X^2(1) = 3.54, p = .060). Both worry and social conflict predict increases in social avoidance over time which highlights their significant roles in maintaining avoidance behaviors. However, the lack of a significant interaction suggests that worry does not moderate the relationship between conflict and social avoidance. These findings emphasize the need for interventions to address these factors separately in efforts to reduce social avoidance in anxiety disorders.