Fear of negative evaluation

Fear of negative evaluation (FNE) was first defined by Watson and Friend in 1969 as "apprehension about others' evaluations, distress over negative evaluations by others, and the expectation that others would evaluate one negatively". FNE is related to specific personality dimensions, such as anxiousness, submissiveness, and social avoidance. People who score high on the FNE scale are highly concerned with seeking social approval or avoiding disapproval by others, and may tend to avoid situations where they have to undergo evaluations. High FNE subjects are also more responsive to situational factors. This has been associated with conformity, pro-social behavior, and social anxiety.

The original Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE) test consists of thirty items with a true-false response format and takes approximate ten minutes to complete. Scale scores range from 0 (low FNE) to 30 (high FNE). In 1983, Leary presented a brief version of the FNE consisting of twelve original questions on a 5-point Likert scale (BFNE). Scale scores range from 12 (low FNE) to 60 (high FNE).

Both the original thirty-item and the brief twelve-item FNE test have been demonstrated to have high internal consistency. The original and brief versions correlate very closely.

FNE does not correlate strongly with other measures of social apprehension, such as the SAD PERSONS scale and the Interaction Anxiousness Scale.

Social anxiety is, in part, a response to perceived negative evaluation by others. Whereas FNE is related to the dread of being evaluated unfavorably when participating in a social situation, social anxiety is defined as a purely emotional reaction to this type of social situation. When patients with social phobia evaluate their relationships, they are extremely fearful of negative evaluation and express high degrees of FNE. As discussed by Ledley, subjects in a study were asked to give a speech after completing a dot-probe paradigm task. After being presented with negative faces, low FNE participants did not display any increased apprehension, whereas high FNE participants displayed more apprehension.

FNE has been suggested to have some genetic component, as are other personality characteristics such as trait anxiousness, submissiveness, and social avoidance. BFNE scores have been found to have a genetic component in twin studies. In addition, BFNE scores and the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology-Basic Questionnaire have been found to be genetically correlated. It has been suggested that the genes that influence negative evaluation fears affect a range of anxiety personality behaviors.

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