The Negative Self-Portrayal Scale: Development, Validation, and Application to Social Anxiety

The Negative Self-Portrayal Scale (NSPS) is a new questionnaire designed to assess the extent to which individuals are concerned that specific self-attributes they view as being deficient will be exposed to scrutiny and evaluation by critical others in social situations. These concerns have been proposed to drive symptoms of social anxiety and account for individual differences in social fears and avoidance behaviors (Moscovitch, 2009). Here, we introduce the NSPS and examine its factor structure and psychometric properties across two large samples of North American undergraduate students with normally distributed symptoms of social anxiety. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a 3-factor solution representing concerns about (a) social competence; (b) physical appearance; and (c) signs of anxiety. The NSPS was found to have good internal consistency and test-retest reliability, strong convergent validity, and adequate discriminant validity. In addition, NSPS total scores accounted for a significant proportion of unique variance in self-concealment (i.e., safety) behaviors over and above established symptom measures of social interaction anxiety, social performance anxiety, and depression. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical models of social anxiety and the potential utility of the NSPS for both clinical research and practice.