Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to focus on shyness and embarrassment as aspects of an integrated and dynamic social psychological process that passes – erroneously – under the rubric of social anxiety. The belief underpinning this approach is that (i) the time is ripe for such conceptual integration and that (2) conceptual, theoretical, and empirical progress will be stimulated by the articulation of such a framework. The intention is to work towards this framework by building upon and refining an approach that is already available in the literature: the selfpresentational theory of social anxiety developed and elaborated by Schlenker and Leary (1982). Indeed, it is suggested that many of the propositions to be outlined in this chapter are currently tacit within the existing literature on social discomfort, and it is time that they were made explicit.

It is contended that the proposed framework accounts for many of the outstanding features of social anxiety – in particular, why it is that a predisposition to shyness and inhibition is linked to a proneness to embarrassment. It also parallels in certain respects Wine's model (1971, 1980, 1982) of test anxiety and Buss's approach (1980) to audience anxiety.