Gaze avoidance in social phobia: Objective measure and correlates

Gaze aversion could be a central component of the physiopathology of social phobia. The emotions of the people interacting with a person with social phobia seem to model this gaze aversion. Our research consists of testing gaze aversion in subjects with social phobia compared to control subjects in different emotional faces of men and women using an eye tracker. Twenty-six subjects with DSM-IV social phobia were recruited. Twenty-four healthy subjects aged and sex-matched constituted the control group. We looked at the number of fixations and the dwell time in the eyes area on the pictures. The main findings of this research are: confirming a significantly lower amount of fixations and dwell time in patients with social phobia as a general mean and for the 6 basic emotions independently from gender; observing a significant correlation between the severity of the phobia and the degree of gaze avoidance. However, no difference in gaze avoidance according to subject/picture gender matching was observed. These findings confirm and extend some previous results, and suggest that eye avoidance is a robust marker of persons with social phobia, which could be used as a behavioral phenotype for brain imagery studies on this disorder.     

Attempted suppression of social threat thoughts: Differential effects for social phobia and healthy controls?

Thought suppression research in the area of social phobia provides conflicting evidence regarding whether individuals demonstrate a general deficit or successful suppression. This paper reports the outcome of two studies using an online thought suppression paradigm measuring activation of target thoughts. Study 1 examined the effects of suppressing social threat stimuli with a healthy control group. Surprisingly, the results showed that participants demonstrated non-suppression of this stimuli class. Study 2 compared individuals with social phobia to a control group using the same stimuli as Study 1. Results revealed that following instructions to suppress social threat stimuli, individuals with social phobia demonstrated successful suppression, whilst the control group, as in Study 1, did not. The lack of suppression of social threat information by the control group may reflect functional impression-management of social threat stimuli. Whereas, successful suppression of these stimuli by individuals with social phobia, may contribute to diminished habituation to such information.     

Coding of stimuli by animals: Retrospection, prospection, episodic memory and future planning

When animals code stimuli for later retrieval they can either code them in terms of the stimulus presented (as a retrospective memory) or in terms of the response or outcome anticipated (as a prospective memory). Although retrospective memory is typically assumed (as in the form of a memory trace), evidence of prospective coding has been found when response intentions and outcomes are particularly salient. At a more abstract level is the question of whether animals are able figuratively to travel back in time to recover memories of past events (episodic memory) and forward in time to predict future events (future planning). Although what would constitute adequate evidence of episodic memory and future planning is controversial, preliminary evidence suggests that animals may be capable of both forms of subjective time travel.     

Repeated measurement of salivary cortisol within and across days among shy young adults

Temperamental shyness emerges early in childhood and remains relatively stable throughout development and has been associated with high and low levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Studies examining the relation between shyness and cortisol have been limited because they have traditionally collected only one measure of cortisol on a single day in the laboratory, restricting the reliability and diurnal profile of the measure in the participant’s everyday environment. We collected 15 saliva samples across three separate days (i.e., upon waking, +60 min post-waking, +8 h post-waking, +10 h post-waking, and bedtime) in a sample of healthy young adults selected for high and low shyness in order to characterize a portion of the diurnal cortisol rhythm. Overall, shy individuals demonstrated relatively lower cortisol across the day and across multiple mornings than non-shy adults. Higher self-reported social anxiety across multiple measures was also related to lower total cortisol levels across all participants. The present study replicates and extends our previous findings of low salivary cortisol measured in the laboratory in shy adults to repeated measurement in their everyday environments.     

Mindfulness and acceptance-based group therapy versus traditional cognitive behavioral group therapy for social anxiety disorder: A randomized controlled trial

Recent research has supported the use of mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions for Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD).     

Individual response differences in spider phobia: Comparing phobic and non-phobic women of different reactivity levels

Abstract

In contrast to previous stress research, studies concerning phobic disorders have never systematically investigated individual response differences between phobic participants integrating numerous different response measures. The aim of this article is to clarify the existence of significant individual response differences in psychophysiological responses (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance responses (SCR), corrugator, cortisol), subjective ratings (e.g., valence, arousal), and avoidance behavior in 46 spider phobic and 44 non-phobic women when exposed to 20 phobic and 20 neutral pictures. Previous studies that did not attend to individual response differences showed that, during phobic stimulation, phobic individuals have increased psychophysiological responses (heart rate, SCR, and corrugator responses), more negative valence rating, and more subjective arousal than non-phobic individuals. These results were confirmed by our data. With regard to individual response uniqueness, 1/3–2/3 of spider-phobic women with low responsiveness in heart rate, cortisol, and avoidance behavior were indistinguishable from non-phobic women during phobic stimulation. With SCR, corrugator EMG, and subjective ratings, no individual response uniqueness was found. Based on the findings, exposure therapy might be improved by tailoring interventions to individuals with a therapeutic focus on those psychophysiological measures that show the highest individual responsivity.     

Thought suppression: specificity in agoraphobia versus broad impairment in social phobia?

The paradoxical effects of intended thought suppression have been linked to psychological disorders, specifically anxiety disorders. So far, the evidence for thought suppression playing a major role in the disorder is mixed. One important issue is whether thought suppression is impaired only for thoughts related to the disorder, or if the ability for mental control is generally impaired in anxiety patients. This study compared groups of agoraphobics and social phobics with a healthy control group. All subjects were asked to suppress two topics related to the respective central fear of the two disorders and one nonspecific topic. We found a rather specific deficit in thought suppression for the agoraphobics; that is, when compared with the control group, we found the biggest differences for the agoraphobic fear. The social phobics seem to be characterized by a general impairment of mental control, affecting specific and nonspecific stimuli. In addition, among several psychopathological variables, social anxiety proved to be the strongest predictor for problems with thought suppression. Taken together, there are several indicators that generally impaired thought suppression may be an important feature of social phobia.