Her PhD research focuses on first-year students, who are prone to experiencing social anxiety, Steenhuis explains. “You’re starting a new life in a new city, with new friends. You’ll find yourself in a lot of unfamiliar social situations where you want to make a good first impression, which can cause stress or anxiety.”
Broad view
Some people are so afraid of being judged negatively by others that it affects their daily lives. They suffer from social anxiety disorder, which affects 4.7 per cent of Dutch young adults aged 18–24. In her research, Steenhuis is deliberately casting a wider net, which has rarely been done before. “Most studies focus on patients. I’m interested in how people experience social anxiety in general – what symptoms they experience, what other factors are involved, and how social anxiety fluctuates both within and between individuals.”
Steenhuis has so far recruited one hundred participants for her study, though she would like to double that number. Participants complete multiple online surveys daily for three weeks. The questions are about the social situations they’re encountering– how many people are present, how well do they know them – and how they experience the situation. The survey also asks how participants felt more generally. “Were they tired, sad, angry? Did they feel confident or insecure?” Steenhuis hopes to identify patterns in the data to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of social anxiety.
New model
She is conducting her research as part of the Gravitation Consortium, a project led by Professor Anita Jansen testing a new model of psychological disorders. “We currently diagnose people based on the DSM-5, a manual describing the symptoms associated with each disorder.” Treatment is based on that diagnosis. But symptoms don’t always fit neatly into diagnostic categories. A person with anorexia may also feel depressed, and a person suffering from depression may also experience panic attacks. The new model explores how symptoms interact and whether it’s more effective to focus treatment on these interactions rather than on the diagnosis.
While Steenhuis has not yet reached the stage of drawing conclusions, her participants are already gaining insight into themselves. “Filling in the survey every day makes them more aware of certain patterns. That’s actually a risk factor in the study: in my analysis, I have to account for the possibility that self-awareness led participants to change their behaviour. But it’s a nice bonus for first-year students.”