Specific associations of passively sensed smartphone data with future symptoms of avoidance, fear, and physiological distress in social anxiety.

Background: Prior literature links passively sensed information about a person's location, movement, and communication with social anxiety. These findings hold promise for identifying novel treatment targets, informing clinical care, and personalizing digital mental health interventions. However, social anxiety symptoms are heterogeneous; to identify more precise targets and tailor treatments, there is a need for personal sensing studies aimed at understanding differential predictors of the distinct subdomains of social anxiety. Our objective was to conduct a large-scale smartphone-based sensing study of fear, avoidance, and physiological symptoms in the context of trait social anxiety over time. Methods: Participants ( Results: A decrease in time visiting novel places was a strong between-person predictor of social avoidance over time (distal Conclusion: Findings have implications for understanding how social anxiety manifests in daily life, and for personalizing treatments. For example, a signal that someone is likely to begin avoiding social situations may suggest a need for alternative types of exposure-based interventions compared to a signal that someone is likely to begin experiencing increased physiological distress. Our results suggest that as a prophylactic means of targeting social avoidance, it may be helpful to deploy interventions involving social exposures in response to decreases in time spent visiting novel places.