Social Anxiety

"The role that the involvement of parents may play in the treatment outcome of their
children with anxiety disorders is still under debate. Some studies dealing with other
disorders have examined the role that the expressed emotion (EE) construct (parental
overinvolvement, criticism and hostility) may play in treatment outcome and relapse.
Given that some of these aspects have been associated with social anxiety for a long time,
it was hypothesized that EE may be associated with lower treatment outcome. The sample
was composed of 16 adolescents who benefited from a school-based, cognitive-behavioural
intervention aimed at overcoming social anxiety. Then, parents were classified with
high or low EE. The results revealed that the adolescents whose parents had low EE
showed a statistically significant reduction of their social anxiety scores at posttest, as
opposed to adolescents of parents with high expressed emotion. These findings suggest
that parental psychopathology (parents with high EE) should be taken into consideration
to prevent poor adolescent treatment outcome."

DEPRESSION, SOCIAL ANXIETY, AND ATTACHMENT AS PREDICTORS OF THE USE AND QUALITY OF CYBER COMMUNICATION. Stefan E. LaTulip Old Dominion University, 2013 Director: Dr. Barbara Winstead This study examined the influence of depression symptoms, social anxiety symptoms, and adult attachment style on the use and the perceptions o f the quality of cyber communications with close friends, romantic partners, and family members. One hundred thirty-five individuals completed an initial survey, with sixty five o f the original group completing a follow-up survey five weeks later. Results indicated that anxious attachment was associated with a greater reported usage o f social networking sites, whereas avoidant attachment predicted less instant message use over time. Depression symptoms and avoidant attachment were generally associated with perceptions o f higher negativity and lower positivity with some of the target groups, where as social anxiety symptoms were generally associated with percep...

This paper describes a study to examine how a social situation can be simulated in a virtual environment, and how to provoke the same behavioral response as in a real life social situation. The aim is to create new Virtual Reality worlds for treating social phobia. Two cases were examined in a virtual environment to assess whether it was able to recreate social behavior of people. First, we examined if participants who enter a crowded room in the virtual environment prefer to take a seat in a chair that is close to them. ...

Everyone has anxiety from time to time, but chronic anxiety can interfere with your quality of life. While perhaps most recognized for behavioral changes, anxiety can also have serious consequences on your physical health. Read on to learn more about the major effects anxiety has on your body.

The aim of this study is to analyse the relationship between Internet addiction andsocial anxiety and social skills difficulties in a sample consisting of 446 Spanish adolescents between 12 and 16 years old.Our results show thatadolescents with high scores in problematic use of the Internetpresent higher scores in social anxiety and social skills difficulties. Furthermore, the intrapersonal addiction showed a positive significant association both with the degree of social anxiety and with lack of assertiveness. On the other hand, the interpersonal addiction did more with social anxiety. Data from this study can help to design and implement prevention programs for a healthy use of the Internet at school and inhome settings.

Perfectionists have shown increased negative affect after failure compared to nonperfectionists. However, little is known about how perfectionists react to repeated failure. This study investigated the effects of two forms of perfectionism—self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism—on 100 university students’ reactions to repeated failure (versus repeated success) examining three negative emotions: anxiety, depression, and anger. Results showed that socially prescribed perfectionism predicted increased anxiety, depression, and anger after initial failure and further increased anger after repeated failure. In contrast, self-oriented perfectionism predicted increased anxiety, but only after repeated failure. The findings suggest that both self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism are vulnerability factors predisposing individuals to react with increased negative affect after repeated failure.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: This work assesses the prevalence and development of disturbing dreams among adolescents and the association of these dreams with anxiety. DESIGN: Sex differences in prevalence were analyzed with chi-square analyses. Changes over time were assessed with Wilcoxon tests and cross-tabulation tables. Associations with anxiety and DSM-III-R symptoms were assessed with ANOVA designs. SETTING: N/A PARTICIPANTS: A total of 610 boys and girls rated their recall of disturbing and normal dreams at both 13 and 16 years of age. Subgroups of subjects were evaluated for anxiety symptoms at age 13 and for DSM-III-R symptoms of separation anxiety (SA), overanxious disorder (OD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) at age 16. INTERVENTIONS: N/A MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS: The recall of disturbing dreams was more prevalent for girls than for boys at both ages, and increased over time for girls while it decreased for boys. The recall of normal dreams was also more prevalent for girls at both ages, but this difference could not fully account for the difference in recall of disturbing dreams. Normal dream recall increased from age 13 to 16 for both sexes. The frequent occurrence of disturbing dreams was associated with anxiety at age 13 and with GAD, SA and OD symptoms at age 16 for both sexes. Evidence of more numerous OD symptoms for girls with frequent disturbing dreams suggests that this form of anxiety may partially account for the observed sex difference in disturbing dream prevalence. CONCLUSIONS: The findings highlight a prevalence of disturbing dreams that is especially marked for adolescent girls. Unlike previous cross-sectional studies, which have found the same sex difference, this longitudinal design also calls attention to within-subjects changes in disturbing dream recall. The results also confirm that the frequent recall of disturbing dreams is associated with pathological symptoms of trait anxiety-apparently even as young as 13 years of age. Further study of disturbing dreams may contribute to understanding of associated pathophysiological factors which, too, vary by sex (e.g., PTSD, insomnia, depression).

The aim of this paper is to provide the prevalence rates of mild, moderate and severe symptoms of social anxiety in a sample of high school students and to analyze gender differences and associated impairment levels within these three levels of severity. Five hundred and twenty students were assessed with the Social Anxiety Spectrum Self-Report (SHY-SR), a questionnaire that explores social anxiety spectrum. By applying two cut-off scores determined on a separate sample by using ROC analysis, the large majority (73.3 %) of subjects were classified as low scorers, 9% as medium scorers and 17.7% as high scorers. Fears related to social situations were reported both by high and medium scorers. Functional impairment defined by avoidance and school difficulties was more common among high scorers, but it was also reported to a significant extent by medium scorers. Compared to low and medium scorers, high scorers showed a higher F/M ratio (about 4:1) and a more homogeneous symptomatologica...

The Approach–Avoidance Task (AAT) was employed to indirectly investigate avoidance reactions to stimuli of potential social threat. Forty-three highly socially anxious individuals (HSAs) and 43 non-anxious controls (NACs) reacted to pictures of emotional facial expressions (angry, neutral, or smiling) or to control pictures (puzzles) by pulling a joystick towards themselves (approach) versus pushing it away from themselves (avoidance). HSAs showed

Patients with social phobia report experiencing negative images of themselves performing poorly when in feared social situations. The present study investigates whether such negative self‐imagery (based on memory of past social situations) contaminates social interactions. High socially anxious volunteers participated in two conversations with another volunteer (conversational partner). During one conversation, the socially anxious volunteers held in mind a negative

Video feedback has been shown to increase performance estimates on the part of speech anxious individuals (R. M. Rapee & K. Hayman, 1996). The present experiment tested a video feedback condition against 2 control conditions. A possible moderator of video feedback effects, the degree to which participants underrated their initial speech, was also tested, as was the possibility of mediation of video feedback's effects by increases in self-efficacy. Participants were 90 speech anxious undergraduate students. Although video feedback showed transitory effects across the sample as a whole, the effect was consistently positive for participants who highly underrated their first speech. Self-efficacy was an important predictor of change in self-perception of performance, but was not a mediator of video feedback's effects.

Research on worry during the past 15 years has revealed a remarkable amount of knowledge about this pervasive human phenomenon. Worry involves a predominance of verbal thought activity, functions as a type of cognitive avoidance, and inhibits emotional processing. Worry also produces not only anxious experience but depressive affect as well. Recent evidence suggests that the very private experience of worry is developmentally connected to enmeshed childhood relationships with the primary caregiver and is currently associated with significant interpersonal problems, especially those involving tendency to be overly nurturing to others. At the physiological level, worry is characterized peripherally by parasympathetic deficiency and autonomic rigidity and centrally by left-frontal activation.

Breathing and politics are not usually considered relevant to one another. Is it therefore possible to engage with breathing as a force of social justice? What kinds of atmospheres can corpomaterial dynamics of breathing help envision for the possibility for individuals and social groups to live breathable lives?

It is my aspiration here to argue that politics can take place not only in terms of governance, social movements, identity politics, and biopolitics but also in terms of quotidian bodily actions—such as breathing. By working with breath as a force that is common to all living and breathing (in this chapter, human) beings yet differential in its enactments, I propose a rethinking of politics in which corpomaterial actions matter—politics not based on universalizing, homogenizing, or essentializing understandings of embodiment or subjectivity but conceptualized and enacted intersectionally in their specific situatedness and dispersal in the individual and structural dynamics of power relations. This chapter of the volume, therefore, explores the possibility of such politics in relation to the quotidian practices of breathing.

Students who are afraid of being judged negatively are experience of an anxiety which is called physical appearance anxiety. Social relations refer the relationship between two or more individuals through communication. Students have higher to encounter physical appearance anxiety towards social relations. This study was conducted in senior high school, in Mandaue City, Cebu Philippines. This research design used a descriptive-correlation to assess and to know the students physical appearance anxiety towards social relations using the rating scale researcher made questionnaire among grade 11 and 12 Senior High School student. Moreover, the quantitative data were analyzed through a weighted mean and processed by using a chi-square. It reveals that when a student experience physical appearance anxiety can affects in their social relations. There is a significant association between physical appearance anxiety regards with social relations. This implies that physical appearance anxiety...

This paper reviews the current status of research on the phenomenology, etiology, maintenance, assessment, and treatment of childhood and adolescent social anxiety disorder (SAD). Despite being one of the most prevalent disorders of childhood and adolescence, SAD paradoxically stands as one of the least recognized, researched, and treated pediatric disorders. The small treatment outcome literature provides preliminary support to the

This paper presents a study about the use of virtual reality techniques Social Anxiety Disorder therapy. The final idea of this technique is to treat social phobic people only by short time exposition in a dedicated stress environment parameterized in real-time. The technique is applied to the problematic of speaking in public with a symbolic representation of an audience. Nevertheless, the same methodology can be used to treat different phobias.

The early contributions of childhood trauma (emotional, physical, sexual, and general) have been hypothesized to play a significant role in the development of anxiety disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD). The aim of this study was to assess childhood trauma differences between PTSD and SAD patients and healthy controls, as measured by the Early Trauma Inventory. We examined individuals (N = 109) with SAD with moderate/severe early developmental trauma (EDT) (n = 32), individuals with SAD with low/no EDT (n = 29), individuals with PTSD with EDT (n = 17), and healthy controls (n = 31). The mean age was 34 years (SD = 11). Subjects were screened with the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI), Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS), and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Analysis of variance was performed to assess group differences. Correlations were calculated between childh...

AIM: Social phobia (SP) represents one of the most frequent psychiatric
disorders. The results of a systematic review of the literature published between
1987 and 2008 on the prevalence of SP in general population are reported.
METHODS: A literature search of epidemiologic studies of SP was conducted on
PubMed and Medline electronic archives and by canvassing English-language and
other European languages publications. Eligible publications were restricted to
community surveys on adult population (age 16 to 65), using DSM and ICD criteria
and analysing lifetime, 12 months and 1 month prevalence rates of SP.
RESULTS: Of the general population studies, 45 prevalence studies met the
criteria of eligibility. The prevalence rates ranged 0.53%-45.6% (lifetime
prevalence); 1.0%-9.10% (12 months prevalence) and 0.96%-7.90% (one month
prevalence). In those community samples SP appears to be from 1.1 to 2.6 times
more frequent in females than in males.
DISCUSSION: Our review suggests that SP is a very common disorder worldwide.
Epidemiologic data on SP seem to be controversial, especially when considering
the prevalence rates. The large variations in prevalence figures are mostly due
to methodological differences, whereas an actual lower rate of SP seems to exist
in the far East areas. Among the Western countries the rates of SP seem to be
similar. A possible explanation to the finding of such a variability in the
estimated SP prevalence rates across different countries could involve the
transcultural differences regarding each population's expectations about
appropriate social and sexual roles.

PMID: 20066793 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]