Social anxiety manifests itself as worry and emotional insecurity in anticipated or actual social situations that pose a source of threat to the individual due to possible social evaluation. These situations involve persons who are important to the individual who is convinced that they are the object of evaluation by others. Social anxiety is manifested in cognitive, emotional, physical, and behavioral domains. A combination of biological and psychological factors contributes to its formation. During adolescence, concerns about negative social evaluation come to the fore, attention to the public self increases, and reluctance to self-disclose increases, with the adolescent creating an imaginary audience. These factors make adolescence a critical period for heightened social anxiety. Pupils with specific learning disabilities are a group of pupils with distinctive specific learning difficulties that are intrinsic and are reflected in a gap between the pupil's general intellectual abilities and their actual performance in reading, writing, spelling, and/or arithmetic. Inadequate acquisition of basic skills results in lower academic performance, and students with specific learning disabilities face a wide range of psychosocial challenges. Compared to normative peers, they often have lower sociometric status and more interpersonal problems and are often victims of peer violence. Deficits in specific areas of learning are thus considered by experts to be risk factors for the development of social anxiety, and there is no clear answer as to the nature of the cause-effect relationships. In the master's thesis, we used the Questionnaire on interpersonal problems in adolescence and the Social anxiety scale for adolescents to examine social anxiety and interpersonal problems in students with specific learning disabilities enrolled in a primary school program with adapted implementation and additional professional support and compared the results with normative peers. We used descriptive and causal non-experimental research methods and a quantitative research approach. The sample consisted of 132 pupils with specific learning disabilities and normative pupils, from grades 6 to 9 of primary school. The results of the empirical study indicated that normative pupils and pupils with specific learning disabilities did not differ significantly in their levels of social anxiety and the expression of interpersonal problems. We confirmed that pupils with specific learning disabilities who score higher on the social anxiety scale also report more difficulties in the areas of assertiveness, public speaking, friendships, relationships with the opposite sex, and significantly more difficulties in interpersonal relationships in general. In the group of pupils with specific learning disabilities, we did not find statistically significant differences in the variables measured by age and grade. Based on age, we found no significant differences in levels of social anxiety and interpersonal problems, even in the full sample of primary school pupils. The findings confirmed that all primary school girls in our sample experience significantly more problems in the areas of assertiveness, public speaking, and interpersonal problems than boys. This was also confirmed for girls with specific learning disabilities when examining differences in a sample of pupils with specific learning disabilities. In both cases, female students were significantly more anxious and fearful of negative social evaluation and scored significantly higher on overall measures of social anxiety compared to boys. Girls with specific learning disabilities identified themselves as significantly more anxious and inhibited in social interactions compared to boys with specific learning disabilities. The findings of this master thesis will contribute to a better understanding of social anxiety, psychosocial functioning, and interpersonal relationships in students with specific learning disabilities as well as normative adolescents.
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