Ana Lucía Schmidt

Social anxiety disorder affects over one-third of young people globally and is characterized by intense fear of social situations and concern about judgment from others. While effective treatments exist, many individuals remain undiagnosed or delay seeking treatment, highlighting the importance of identifying complementary strategies. Natural environments have shown benefit for mental health, yet their therapeutic potential for social anxiety remains understudied from the patient’s perspective. We analyzed Reddit posts from adolescents and young adults in a social anxiety community to explore their experiences with green and blue spaces. From over 535,000 posts, we identified 1,887 nature-related posts through computational and manual review. The results showed a complex relationship between natural environments and social anxiety symptoms. While many users reported that being in the outdoors and outdoor activities helped reduce their anxiety and improved their moods, others described the environments as triggering due to fears of being observed or judged. Our findings suggest that natural environments may be perceived as helpful, accessible options for managing social anxiety, particularly when combined with physical activity. However, interventions must be carefully designed to address the unique social evaluation concerns that distinguish social anxiety from other anxiety disorders. These insights could inform the development of nature-based approaches that complement traditional treatments.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) affects up to 1 in 8 individuals over their lifetime and is characterized by an intense fear of social situations where there may be exposure to unfamiliar people or possible scrutiny. The analysis of social media data rather than traditional methods (interviews or focus groups) can provide a unique opportunity to understand the lived experience of individuals with SAD, for whom interacting with strangers is challenging. This retrospective observational study reviewed published literature from PubMed and data from Reddit using social media listening (SML). A stepwise analysis in line with US Food and Drug Administration Patient-Focused Drug Development guidelines was performed to develop a conceptual model for SAD. Natural language processing techniques and machine learning approaches were employed to extract symptoms and impacts described by individuals with SAD. Eleven publications from the literature and 535,544 posts from 118,040 Reddit users were included. Clinical and patient experts then refined the conceptual model covering three key symptom domains (physical, negative automatic thoughts, and emotions) and two impact domains (social functioning and occupational/educational functioning). This study provides insights into the lived experience of individuals with SAD and confirms the value of SML when traditional methods are inappropriate.

Background Patients of certain diseases are less likely to approach the healthcare system but remain active in social media. Young Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) patients, in particular, are a hard-to-reach population due to disease symptomatology, unmet need and age-related barriers, which makes obtaining first-hand access to patient perspectives challenging. Objective To create a curated cohort of patients from social media that report their age in the range of 13 to 25 years old and confirm having a SAD diagnosis or having received therapy for SAD, and to assess the value of the content posted by these users for observational studies of SAD. Methods We collected 535k posts by 118k Reddit users from the r/SocialAnxiety subreddit. We then developed precise regular expressions to extract age, diagnosis and therapy mentions. We manually annotated the full set of expressions extracted and double-annotated 5% of the age mentions and 10% of the diagnosis and therapy mentions. Using similar methodology, we identified mentions of comorbidities and substance use. Results Our validated cohort includes 37,073 posts by 1,102 users that meet the inclusion criteria. The age, diagnosis, and therapy mention detection had a precision of 68%, 31%, and 44%, respectively, with an inter-annotator agreement of 0.96, 0.96, and 0.78. Sixty-one percent of the users in the cohort report having one or more comorbidities on top of their SAD diagnosis (Fleiss’s Kappa=0.79) and 13% report a concerning use of drugs or alcohol (Fleiss’s Kappa=0.87). We compared the characteristics of our social media cohort to the published literature on SAD. Conclusions Patients with SAD post actively on Reddit and their perspectives can be captured and studied directly from these data. Extracting age, therapy, substance abuse and comorbidities (and potentially other patient data) can address realworld data source biases. Thus, social media is a valuable source to create cohorts of hard-to-reach patient populations that may not enter the healthcare system.

The COVID-19 pandemic made explicit the issues of communicating science in an information ecosystem dominated by social media platforms. One of the fundamental communication challenges of our time is to provide the public with reliable content and contrast misinformation. This paper investigates how social media can become an effective channel to promote engagement and (re)build trust. To measure the social response to quality communication, we conducted an experimental study to test a set of science communication recommendations on Facebook and Twitter. The experiment involved communication practitioners and social media managers from select countries in Europe, applying and testing such recommendations for five months. Here we analyse their feedback in terms of adoption and show that some differences emerge across platforms, topics, and recommendation categories. To evaluate these recommendations’ effect on users, we measure their response to quality content, finding that the median engagement is generally higher, especially on Twitter. The results indicate that quality communication strategies may elicit positive feedback on social media. A data-driven and co-designed approach in developing counter-strategies is thus promising in tackling misinformation.

European science communication project QUEST surveyed and reviewed different aspects of European science communication, including science journalism, teaching and training in science communication, social media activity, and science in museums. This article draws together themes that collectively emerge from this research to present an overview of key issues in science communication across Europe. We discuss four central dynamics — fragmentation within research and practice; a landscape in transition; the importance of format and context; and the dominance of critical and dialogic approaches as best practice — and illustrate these with empirical material from across our datasets. In closing we reflect upon the implications of this summary of European science communication.

Although the need to improve quality of science communication is often mentioned in public discussions, the science communication literature offers few conceptualizations of quality. We used a concept mapping approach, involving representatives of various science communication stakeholder groups working collaboratively, to propose a framework of quality. The framework organizes individual elements of quality into twelve indicators arranged into three dimensions: trustworthiness and scientific rigour, presentation and style, and connection with society. The framework supports science communicators in reflecting on their current practices and designing new activities, potentially improving communication effectiveness.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.