Cognitive therapy treats social phobia
Extreme shyness needs enhanced cognitive behaviour therapy to get treated.
Extreme shyness that holds people back in social situations and prevents them from meeting other people needs enhanced cognitive behaviour therapy to get treated.
About one in 20 people suffer from an extreme form of shyness known as social phobia. People with social phobia can usually interact easily with family and a few close friends but meeting new people, talking in a group, or speaking in public can cause their extreme shyness to kick in.
Current treatments, including cognitive therapy and other traditional systems of teaching people practical skills to manage their fears, can achieve reasonably good results. Researchers, however, have been trying to refine the process even further to improve outcomes as theoretical models suggest that targeting several specific cognitive factors in treatment could increase the efficacy of treatment.
To explore the methods of treating social phobia in adults with a better success ratio, researchers identified 195 people with social phobia and randomly allocated them to one of three treatments - standard cognitive restructuring plus in vivo exposure; an enhanced treatment that amplified the standard programme with several additional treatment techniques (e.g., performance feedback, attention retraining); and a nonspecific stress management treatment. Improved treatment included giving sufferers clear, detailed feedback about their social performance and teaching them how to better focus their attention when feeling frightened.
Participants in the study were divided into small groups. After learning some basic anxiety management techniques, they were gradually encouraged to face their fears over 12 weekly sessions.
At the end of the treatment, over 40 percent of participants showed large and dramatic changes in how they coped with their fears while many others showed good improvements. Moreover, the enhanced treatment demonstrated significantly greater effects on diagnoses, diagnostic severity, and anxiety during a speech.
The findings indicate that traditional cognitive behaviour therapy clubbed with enhanced techniques including practical sessions can better treat social phobia among adults.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
May 2009
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