The relationship between social skills and social anxiety and personality styles/disorders

The relationship between social skills and social anxiety has been addressed conceptually but studied little empirically. Scarcer still are the studies on the relationship between social skills and personality styles/disorders. This paper uses a sample of mostly university students to find possible relationships between social skills, on the one hand, and social anxiety and personality styles/disorders, on the other. The correlations of the total scores for the instruments of social skills and social anxiety were moderate-to-high and negative; that is, the lower the social skill, the greater the social anxiety, and vice versa. This same level of correlation was also obtained by analyzing the specific dimensions of each construct, which shows that there are shared aspects between social skills and social anxiety. Furthermore, the relationship between social skills and personality disorders varies depending on the specific personality style/disorder. Most correlations are negative, except for histrionic, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, and antisocial styles/disorders. These results provide support for a significant part of the interpersonal characteristics of each personality disorder.