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This study investigate urban migrant dwellers’ gender and age differences in response to the specific phobia of COVID-19 and hesitancy toward vaccines in the slum settlements.

The study anchored on the two-factor model proposed by Mowrer (1939) and used a quantitative design approach with a convenience sampling method for data gathering among 362 urban migrants residing and working in the cities of Ghana. The study used the Mann–Whitney U test and the regression analysis for the analysis.

The result showed that there is a significant difference between males and females in their understanding of economic phobia, thoughts on social phobia and perception level of vaccine hesitancy. Additionally, there is a significant difference between age groups in their level of thoughts of psychological phobia, economic phobia and thoughts of vaccine hesitancy. Finally, the specific of phobias of COVID-19 are significant predictors of vaccine hesitancy.

This research is slum-specific, which implies that the outcome cannot be generalized to other geographical settings.

The study demonstrates how a pandemic manifests itself to dwellers in slums. The outcome of the study sheds light on how policymakers appreciate the dynamics of the pandemic in a developing country, which may guide future responses to pandemics.

The outcome of the study sheds light on how policymakers appreciate the dynamics of the pandemic in a developing country, which may guide future responses to pandemics.

Although social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common mental disorder, it is often under diagnosed and under treated. The aim of this study is to assess the prevalence, severity, disability, and quality of life towards SAD among students of Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. A cross-sectional study was conducted among a stratified sample of 500 undergraduate students to identify the prevalence of SAD, its correlates, related disability, and its impact on the quality life. All participants completed the Social Phobia Inventory, Leibowitz Social Anxiety Scale, Sheehan Disability Scale, and the WHO Quality of Life – BREF questionnaire. Of 476 students, 25.8% were screened positive for SAD. About 47.2% of the students had mild symptoms, 42.3% had moderate to marked symptoms, and 10.5% had severe to very severe symptoms of SAD. Students who resulted positive for SAD reported significant disabilities in work, social, and family areas, and this has adversely affected their quality of life as compared to those who screened negative for SAD. Students reported several clinical manifestations that affected their functioning and social life. Acting, performing or giving a talk in front of an audience was the most commonly feared situation. Blushing in front of people was the most commonly avoided situation. Since the present study showed a marked prevalence of SAD among students, increased disability, and impaired quality of life, rigorous efforts are needed for early recognition and treatment of SAD.

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize and integrate a body of psychological literature regarding an individual difference related to the experience of anxiety that largely, and somewhat surprisingly, has been overlooked by organizational scientists. This variable, most often called social anxiety or social phobia, reflects a strong fear that one is in danger of behaving inappropriately, inadequately, or ineptly, with impending disastrous consequences such as rejection, humiliation, or ouster from a group (Trower & Gilbert, 1990). In providing a summary of the construct and ongoing investigations, the chapter offers ideas for future research into how this important variable may influence behaviors at work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence of anxiety in youngsters with emotional and behavioral disorders, and its relation to other problems, using different informants.

Data were collected in a Flemish treatment center. Educators completed a Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) for each child, teachers completed a Teacher Report Form (TRF), and youth themselves completed a Youth Self Report (YSR) and a Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED).

Analyses indicated an explicit presence of anxiety. A clear relation was found between anxiety symptoms and internalizing problem behavior on the YSR, whereas only a slight relationship was found with the CBCL, and practically no relationship was found with the TRF. Only few correlations between anxiety and externalizing problems were found. Finally, youth themselves indicated strong correlations between anxiety and thought problems, whereas educators indicated strong correlations between youths’ anxiety and social problems.

Several studies describe professionals’ difficulties to get a comprehensive perceptions of youths’ problems. This paper provides detailed insights in the nature of the informant discrepancies.

Due to ongoing significant life changes during the transition into higher education, social anxiety can be problematic, especially for college students. It has adverse effects on various aspects of one’s life, including one’s feelings and emotions. The study investigated the interplay between social anxiety and emotions and its impact on affect. The aim of this study is to examine the role of difficulties in emotion regulation in the relationship between social anxiety and change in affect.

This is a longitudinal study. Data was collected with self-report instruments at two time points with a gap of four months. Participants were Indian undergraduate students from a technical institute.

The result revealed that high social anxiety in tandem with difficulties engaging in goal-directed behavior significantly impacts changes in positive affect. However, this effect was significant only in the presence of depression.

This study highlights the harmful impact of comorbid issues such as depression in socially anxious individuals. The present study might have implications for educators and clinicians working with college students.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the only study to test the proposed research model in a sample of Indian college students. The use of a moderated moderation analysis with the three regulation strategies and depression also adds to the uniqueness of this study.

This study aims at a better understanding of parents’ identity work when their parenting skills are questioned, in an organizational setting. The parents in this study were assessed as at risk of unsatisfactory parental functioning because of problems related to drugs, mental health and/or psychosocial functioning, and they were observed and offered guidance at an extended health centre in Norway. The study explores how individual self-presentations are interwoven with and dependent on organizational narratives of identity.

Based on an analysis of 16 qualitative interviews, three exemplary cases are analyzed in detail. Narrative identity and professional gaze constitute the theoretical framework.

Parents and service providers negotiate which organizational narratives of identity are available, and the narratives are integrated in parents’ self-presentations in different ways. The most common strategy is to accept the organizational narratives offered, but they are also transformed and rejected. The experience of being seen by an empathic professional gaze contributes to the creation of an acceptable self-narrative.

Tending to parents’ identity needs should be an integral part of services provided. If parents are to cooperate with state services and engage in interventions, their needs for preserving an acceptable and coherent self-narrative must be considered.

This paper adds to the understanding of how identity work is a central feature of service provision. It also adds to the literature on relationships between identity narratives at different levels of society.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness from a psychological perspective, examining the relationship of physical attractiveness with the three dimensions of self-consciousness.

The research involved investigating the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness, focusing on how the three self-consciousness dimensions (i.e., private self-consciousness, public self-consciousness and social anxiety) affected physical attractiveness. Clustering techniques using self-organizing maps of data mining and decision trees were used in this study. The primal concept of clustering entails grouping unsorted and disorganized raw data and arranging data with similar properties into clusters. Classification primarily involves establishing classification models according to the category attributes of existing data. These models can be used to predict the classes of new data and determine interdata relationships and data characteristics.

Public self-consciousness was most strongly related to physical attractiveness, whereas the other two dimensions exhibited no obvious relationship to physical attractiveness. It may be concluded that people with higher physical attractiveness draw attention from others more easily and are more likely to be evaluated positively, and that they thus tend to be more confident in front of others and less likely to care about the opinions of others. Alternatively, perhaps people with lower public self-consciousness care less about how others view them and have the courage to express themselves, which signifies confidence and increases their physical attractiveness.

This research investigated the importance of self-consciousness that may apply to recruitment in practice. People with low public self-consciousness may have high confidence and efficiency. People have low social anxiety may not be nervous or anxious in public and easy to speak to strangers. This kind of employees are appropriate for the jobs involving team work and interaction such as public relations. Hence, companies can apply our findings to search appropriate employees except the first impression of appearance.

The results revealed that high physical attractiveness is related to low public self-consciousness, whereas low physical attractiveness is related to high public self-consciousness. Good-looking people tend to attract attention from others. The relationship between private self-consciousness and physical attractiveness is non-significant. The relationship between social anxiety and physical attractiveness is non-significant.

While a number of scholars have observed that the contemporary self has to negotiate a “push and pull” between autonomy and a desire for community (Austin & Gagne, 2008; Bauman, 2001a, p. 60; Coles, 2008; Giddens, 2003, p. 46, the struggle between the “self” and “others” that is at the heart of symbolic interactionist (SI) understandings of the self is often missing from sociological discussion on the “making of the self” (Coles, 2008, p. 21; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000), and the current chapter contributes to this literature.

To gain insight into “the making of the self,” in-depth life history interviews were conducted with 23 former members of new religious movements (NRMs) specific to their construction of self. Interview data was analyzed for variations in the ways in which individuals describe their construction of self. To make sense of these variations, SI understandings of the self are applied.

Analysis indicates that the extent to which individuals are informed by the social versus the personal in their self-construction is a continuum. From an SI perspective the self is conceptualized as to varying degrees informed by both the personal and the social. These two “domains” of the self are interrelated or connected through an ongoing process of reflexivity that links internal experiences and external feedback. From this perspective, “healthy” selves reflexively balance a sense of personal uniqueness against a sense of belonging and social connectedness. While a reflexive balance between the “self” and “others” is optimal, not everyone negotiates this balance successfully, and the extent to which individuals are informed by the social versus the personal in their self-construction varies and can be conceptualized as on a continuum between autonomy and social connectedness. The current findings suggest that where individuals are positioned on this continuum is dependent on the availability of cultural and personal resources from which individuals can construct selves, in particular in childhood. Those participants who described themselves as highly dependent on others report childhood histories of control, whereas those who described themselves as disconnected from others report histories of abuse and neglect.

The problems of relying on retrospective accounts of former members should be noted as such accounts are interpretive and influenced by the respondents’ present situation. However, despite their retrospective and constructionist nature, life history narratives provide meaningful insights into the actual process of self and identity construction. The analysis of retrospective accounts is a commonly recommended and chosen method for the study of the self (Davidman & Greil, 2007; Diniz-Pereira, 2008).

The current findings suggest that significant differences may exist in the way in which individuals construct and narrate their sense of self, in particular in regards to the way in which they experience and negotiate contemporary tensions between social connectedness and individuality. In particular, the findings highlight the importance of childhood environments for the construction of “healthy” selves that can negotiate contemporary demands of autonomy as well as social connectedness.