Screening Social Anxiety with AI Pictures

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) affects many people. It makes them very scared of social situations. Doctors need to detect SAD early to help people sooner. But this is hard because those with SAD avoid social settings. Also, questionnaires used now have problems like personal opinions influencing results and memories being biased. So, a new, easy-to-use tool is needed. An interesting solution is SAIPS, which uses AI pictures. SAIPS has 279 pictures of social situations and 118 without social interactions. These pictures cover things that trigger SAD, like fear of being judged, social meetings, and performance stress.

The pictures without social interactions help show how people react to social situations, making SAIPS better at predicting SAD. Through lab and online tests, people gave ratings for five aspects. AI results showed that these ratings clearly showed a person's social anxiety traits, especially their anxiety and arousal. Even with fewer than 30 pictures, the predictions were reliable. SAIPS could be a helpful tool for detecting SAD and making long-term predictions.

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