Social anxiety, mentalizing and social distance preference: A preliminary psychometric evaluation

Humans' ability to interact with strangers is fundamental, and an individual's mentalizing ability is closely linked to inferences and interactions with strangers. The main aim of this study is to identify the quantitative mentalizing capability with social distance preferences and interaction attitudes with individual variation. In the first two experiments, we examined association between mentalizing ability, social anxiety and conducted behavioral experiments with Virtual Social Distance (VSD, experiment 2a, N = 223) and Real Social Distance (RSD, experiment 2b, N = 45) preference tasks. In experiment 3, we induced the "social exclusion" paradigm (N = 94) and linked it to the measured dynamic characteristic of mentalization. The findings reveal that: (i) individuals with lower capability of self-perception show a greater degree of social anxiety and a diminished capacity for meta-cognition; (ii) higher degree of "social anxiety" associates more with VSD preference naturally; and (iii) participants from the "socially excluded group" show decreasing tendency in their mentalizing capability. The results provide new insights into social distance preferences and how social environment variations affect sub-clinical social anxious individuals, highlighting individual differences in social interaction preference. It may also have the potential for intervention and treatment for people with anxiety in social interactions