Emotional and Physiological Responses to Social‐Evaluative Threat

Social‐evaluative threat has been theorized to elicit coordinated psychological and physiological responses, including increases in self‐conscious emotions as well as increases in cortisol and proinflammatory cytokine activity. Acute laboratory stressors with social‐evaluative threat have triggered robust increases in cortisol, whereas equivalent laboratory stressors without this explicit social‐evaluative component have not elicited changes in this physiological parameter. Participants who have reported the greatest increases in self‐conscious emotions have also shown the greatest increases in cortisol activity, suggesting that these physiological changes may occur in concert with self‐conscious states. Other work has shown that social‐evaluative threat and accompanying self‐conscious emotions can influence immune parameters associated with inflammation. These findings have implications for a number of areas of research within social and personality psychology.