I am developing and testing the LSAE framework, which proposes that social anxiety reflects an overcalibrated system for navigating dominance-oriented hierarchies: input biases toward dominance cues, status-privileged interpretations, and appeasement outputs that reduce the costs of conflict. In earlier work I showed that social anxiety involves an elevated cost bias specific to status-loss events, and that experimentally induced rank shifts, using the CyberStatus paradigm, alter distress and avoidance in ways consistent with threat regulation. I am now testing the model's predictions across attention, interpretation, and self-description, and examining the hypothesis that risk peaks when low status co-occurs with a highly agonistic classroom climate.