(PS3-16) Integrating Multi-Informant Reports about Adolescents’ Fears of Negative and Positive Evaluation

When adolescents experience social anxiety, they often fear evaluations of their performance in social settings, particularly by unfamiliar people (Weeks & De Los Reyes, 2025). Among adolescents, understanding these fears involves assessing their valence (i.e., fears of negative and positive evaluation [FNE, FPE]), using an approach that incorporates the reports of multiple informants. When assessing adolescents, prior work supports the value of leveraging FNE and FPE reports from adolescents and their parents (Botkin et al., 2021). Yet, when assessing adolescents on anxiety-related domains, emerging work supports not only integrating the reports of adolescents and their parents, but also including the perspectives of a third informant who simulates how same-age, unfamiliar peers observe adolescents (unfamiliar untrained observer [UUO; Follet et al., 2023; Rezeppa et al., 2021]). Prior work has yet to probe the incremental value of UUOs’ reports when assessing adolescent FNE and FPE. As such, we tested the incremental value of adolescent, parent, and UUO reports, and the ability to integrate them in a mixed clinical/community sample of 134 adolescents (M=14.5 years, 66.4% female). Informants completed reports about adolescent FNE and FPE using well-established measures of both domains (e.g., Karp et al., 2018; Racz et al., 2024). Further, trained independent observers rated adolescents’ social anxiety during a set of tasks designed to estimate how adolescents react to social interactions with unfamiliar peers (Cannon et al., 2020). Consistent with prior work (Botkin et al., 2021), the three informants’ FPE and FNE reports varied in their relation to independent observers’ ratings of adolescent social anxiety, with Pearson r correlations ranging from .16 to .48. When probing the incremental value of these informants’ reports, UUOs’ FNE reports uniquely related to trained independent observers’ ratings of adolescents’ social anxiety (ß=.30; p< .001), whereas parents’ and adolescents’ FNE reports did not (ßs=.14; ps=.11). In contrast, parents’ (ß=.15; p< .05), adolescents’ (ß=.27; p< .001), and UUOs’ (ß=.41; p< .001) FPE reports related to observers’ ratings of adolescent social anxiety. Consistent with recent work on multi-informant assessments of other anxiety-related domains (Charamut et al., 2022; Makol et al., 2025), we successfully integrated informants’ FPE and FNE reports, using a procedure that capitalizes on the unique information contributed by each informant’s report (see Kraemer et al., 2003). In doing so, we discovered that integrated reports about FPE uniquely predicted trained independent observers’ ratings of observed anxiety (ß=.60; p< .001), whereas integrated reports about FNE did not (ß=-.07; p=.40). These findings inform efforts in strategically selecting informants to validly assess adolescents’ evaluative fears. In doing so, these findings pave the way for implementing strategies for integrating informants’ reports that are designed to optimize their measurement validity as well as their utility for informing clinical decision-making among youth receiving services for social anxiety.