Longitudinal examination of social anxiety safety behaviors in college students.

OBJECTIVE Safety behaviors are meant to mitigate social anxiety but can exacerbate symptoms over time. College health professionals work with many students experiencing social anxiety. Understanding how safety behaviors change over a semester could inform work with these students. This study aimed to 1) examine longitudinal changes in safety behaviors in college students, 2) examine potential moderators of change in safety behaviors. PARTICIPANTS Participants included 212 undergraduates at a mid-sized, private university in the U.S. METHODS Participants completed four weekly surveys. RESULTS Safety behaviors decreased over time regardless of year in school (b = -1.52, p < .001). This decrease was not moderated by participants' average levels of social anxiety or positive or negative affect. CONCLUSIONS The semester's beginning may be a time of increased reliance on safety behaviors in college students, but safety behaviors can decrease overtime in a nonclinical college population without intervention.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of American College Health

• Publication date

  2025-11-10

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/07448481.2025.2577652PMID 41214451
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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