Background <p>Social anxiety is highly prevalent among college students and is associated with impaired academic functioning and long-term social maladjustment. Although prior research has documented the adaptive value of self-supporting personality, the specific cognitive-behavioral mechanisms linking this culturally grounded resource to social anxiety remain underexplored. Identifying culturally grounded personality resources and the psychological mechanisms through which they operate may contribute to more precise intervention strategies. Drawing on indigenous personality theory and cognitive–behavioral models, the present study examined the association between self-supporting personality and social anxiety among Chinese college students, with a particular focus on the sequential mediating roles of attention bias and social problem-solving orientation within a valence-specific dual-path framework.</p> Methods <p>A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 660 undergraduate students from three universities in Henan Province, China. Participants completed measures of self-supporting personality, positive and negative attention bias, social problem-solving orientation, and social anxiety. Serial mediation analyses were performed using the PROCESS macro (Model 6) with bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals.</p> Results <p>The results indicated that self-supporting personality was significantly associated with lower levels of social anxiety. Both positive and negative attention bias, as well as positive and negative social problem-solving orientation, independently mediated this association. Moreover, two valence-specific sequential mediation pathways were supported. Moreover, two valence-specific sequential mediation pathways were supported. On the positive pathway, self-supporting personality was associated with enhanced positive attention bias, which in turn predicted a more positive social problem-solving orientation and, subsequently, lower social anxiety. On the negative pathway, self-supporting personality was associated with reduced negative attention bias, which predicted lower negative social problem-solving orientation and reduced social anxiety. Notably, in the negative pathway, the serial indirect effect was larger than the independent effect through problem orientation alone, which is consistent with the theoretical assumption that attentional processes precede behavioral orientations. In contrast, the positive pathway exhibited balanced contributions from all three indirect pathways, consistent with synergistic resource-building processes.</p> Conclusion <p>These findings suggest that self-supporting personality may be associated with social anxiety primarily through distinct valence-specific mechanisms—a hierarchical threat-focused pathway and a synergistic resource-building pathway. The results highlight the importance of targeting modifiable attentional and problem-solving processes when designing interventions to reduce social anxiety among college students.</p>