Predictive effect of perceived helicopter parenting and interpersonal emotion regulation on social anxiety

Social anxiety is one of the psychological disorders with a high prevalence. Perceived helicopter parenting can be shown among the important risk factors due to its relationship with social anxiety. It is observed that emotion regulation skills are relatively less studied in the interpersonal dimension. In addition, there are mixed findings in the literature regarding the relationship between social anxiety and interpersonal emotion regulation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the relationships between social anxiety, perceived helicopter parenting and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies and to examine the predictive effect of perceived helicopter parenting attitude and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies on social anxiety. In this direction, the data of a total of 397 individuals, 99 males and 298 females, aged between 18-30 years (M=25.66; SD=2.608) were included in the study. Demographic Information Form, Helicopter Parent Attitude Scale (HPAS), Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ) were used to collect the data respectively. According to the findings of the study, it was found that there is a negative correlation between enhancing positive affect and social anxiety, and a positive and significant correlation between perspective taking and soothing and social anxiety. It was found that perceived helicopter parenting and social anxiety is weakly related. There is a very weak correlation between perceived maternal helicopter parenting and perspective taking. In addition, it was concluded that perceiving higher levels of helicopter parenting predicts higher social anxiety symptoms. It was also determined that using more soothing and less enhancing positive affect as interpersonal emotion regulation strategies also predicts social anxiety. The findings were compared with the related literature, the importance and limitations of the study were discussed and some suggestions were made for future studies.