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Employment

Avoidant Personality Disorder does not generaly impact on an individuals intellectual or physical capacities. In 'safe' familiar situations they will generally demonstrate no symptoms.

Job seeking can be very challenging because it triggers the individuals basic concerns. The individual will often have a great deal of difficulty effectively presenting their skills and qualifications. They will be awkward and uncomfortable in a job interview. An employer could easily discount the individuals abilities because of the manner in which they present themselves.

In employment they may have a great deal of trouble in new or changing situations. They will have trouble with interpersonal relationships and public speaking. They will tend to be perfectionists but downplay their skills, abilities and accomplishments. They will have a great deal of difficulty with any job that requires them to "sell" or even present their work to a potential customer, or even other co-workers.

Since their standard practice is to avoid situations that elicit their anxiety, they may just not attend important meetings, or be unable to participate in team discussions because they cannot allow themselves to feel part of a team.

Memory

Avoidants often report having a poor memory particularly for peoples names.

An emerging literature has begun to document the cognitive consequences of emotion regulation. A process model of emotion suggests that expressive suppression (conscious efforts to inhibit overt emotion-expressive behavior), should reduce memory for emotional events. Results from recent studies have supported this.

Since people with APD are consistantly tense & anxious and exposed to emotion-eliciting situations but may exhibit little affect due to the fear that showing their emotions will make them vulnerable to rejection or humiliation (Kantor; Millon & Everly), it is likely that emotion-expressive suppression is an almost constant feature.

The literature on social phobia suggests that the phobics are unable to socialy interact because they are so focussed on their internal reactions. Research on avoidant personality disorder also emphasizes that avoidants are engaged in external monitoring of the other person's reactions as well.

The excessive monitoring by avoidants together with rigorous expressive suppression may use up a large portion of finite psychological resources resulting in a decrease of memory for the details of the unfolding emotion-eliciting situation.

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