Effect of stress tolerance on adolescents with social anxiety

Social anxiety disorder is the psychological disorder where interpersonal disruption and debilitation, including a persistent fear of embarrassment and rejection in social interactions or performance situations is involved. It is the third largest disorder in prevalence. The present study focuses on the stress tolerance of the socially anxious adolescents. For the same, 120 adolescents were selected from different schools across 6 districts of Kerala, between the ages of 14 to 17 years, out of which 60 were socially anxious students and 60 non socially anxious students. The participants were administered Social Social Anxiety Measure (Raj, H.S., 1995), and Stress tolerance scale (Reshmy and Sananda Raj, 1999), The analysis was done in SPSS version 20, Student's t-test and Pearson's correlation coefficient were used. The results show that socially anxious adolescents had poor stress tolerance when compared to the non socially anxious group. And social anxiety was found to increase significantly when stress tolerance decreased.