Adolescents who experience social anxiety concerns often display symptoms and impairments when interacting with unfamiliar peers. For adolescent clients, reducing symptoms and impairments within these interactions comprises a key treatment target within exposure-based therapies for social anxiety. Recent work on mechanisms of change in exposure-based therapies highlights the need for therapeutic exposures to simulate real-world manifestations of anxiety-provoking social situations. Yet, researchers encounter difficulty with gathering ecologically valid data about social interactions with unfamiliar peers. The lack of these data inhibits building an evidence base for understanding, assessing, and treating adolescent clients whose concerns manifest within these social interactions. Consequently, we developed a paradigm for understanding adolescent social anxiety within social interactions with unfamiliar peers. In this paradigm, we train peer confederates to interact with adolescents as if they were a same-age peer, within a battery of social interaction tasks that mimic key characteristics of therapeutic exposures. Leveraging experimental psychopathology and multi-modal assessment approaches, this paradigm allows for understanding core components of social interactions with unfamiliar peers relevant to exposure-based therapy, including stimuli variability, habituation, expectancy violations, peers’ impressions about socially anxious adolescents, and maladaptive coping strategies that inhibit learning from exposures (e.g., safety behaviors). We detail the conceptual and empirical foundations of this paradigm, highlight important directions for future research, and report “proof of concept” data supporting these research directions. The Unfamiliar Peer Paradigm opens new doors for building a basic science that informs evidence-based services for social anxiety, within clinically relevant contexts in adolescents’ social worlds.

遇到社交焦虑的青少年在与陌生的同龄人互动时经常表现出症状和障碍。对于青春期客户，减少这些相互作用中的症状和障碍是社交焦虑基于暴露的疗法中的关键治疗目标。基于接触疗法的变化机制的最新研究强调，需要进行治疗接触以模拟现实世界中引起焦虑的社会状况。然而，研究人员在收集有关与陌生人的社交互动的生态有效数据时遇到困难。这些数据的缺乏阻碍了为理解，评估和治疗在这些社交互动中表现出担忧的青少年客户建立证据基础。所以，我们开发了一种范式，用于在与陌生人的社交互动中理解青少年的社交焦虑。在这种范例中，我们在模仿社交治疗任务关键特征的一系列社交互动任务中，训练同伴同伴与青少年互动，就好像他们是同龄同龄人一样。利用实验心理病理学和多模式评估方法，该范例可以理解与与基于暴露的疗法相关的陌生同龄人的社交互动的核心组成部分，包括刺激变异性，习惯，预期违规，同龄人对社交焦虑青少年的印象以及适应不良的应对禁止从接触中学习的策略（例如，安全行为）。我们详细介绍了该范式的概念和经验基础，突出显示未来研究的重要方向，并报告支持这些研究方向的“概念验证”数据。陌生的对等范式为在青少年社会世界中与临床相关的背景下，建立基础科学开辟了新的大门，该基础科学为基于证据的社交焦虑服务提供了信息。