Social phobia features across the DSM-III-R anxiety disorders

One hundred sixty subjects meeting DSM-III-R criteria for the five major anxiety disorders were compared on the extent to which they reported features characteristic of social phobia. The results indicated that many patients in the anxiety disorder categories experience some degree of social anxiety. The differences between subjects with a primary diagnosis of social phobia and subjects with other anxiety disorders appear to be chiefly quantitative on this feature. Compared to the other anxiety disorders, social phobics report fear and avoidance in response to a greater number of social situations and report greater interference in their lives due to social phobic concerns. Among the anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety disorder appears to be associated with the greatest degree of social anxiety, and simple phobia with the least.     

Animal foraging and the evolution of goal-directed cognition

Foraging- and feeding-related behaviors across eumetazoans share similar molecular mechanisms, suggesting the early evolution of an optimal foraging behavior called area-restricted search (ARS), involving mechanisms of dopamine and glutamate in the modulation of behavioral focus. Similar mechanisms in the vertebrate basal ganglia control motor behavior and cognition and reveal an evolutionary progression toward increasing internal connections between prefrontal cortex and striatum in moving from amphibian to primate. The basal ganglia in higher vertebrates show the ability to transfer dopaminergic activity from unconditioned stimuli to conditioned stimuli. The evolutionary role of dopamine in the modulation of goal-directed behavior and cognition is further supported by pathologies of human goal-directed cognition, which have motor and cognitive dysfunction and organize themselves, with respect to dopaminergic activity, along the gradient described by ARS, from perseverative to unfocused. The evidence strongly supports the evolution of goal-directed cognition out of mechanisms initially in control of spatial foraging but, through increasing cortical connections, eventually used to forage for information.     

Comparison of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral one-session exposure treatments for small animal phobias

This study evaluated the efficacy of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral one-session exposure treatment procedures with and without programmed generalization for participants with small animal phobias. Forty participants were randomly assigned to the treatment and generalization conditions. Both treatments produced significant improvements from pre-test to post-test and these results were maintained for 1 year. The treatment effect sizes ranged from large to very large across behavioral, self-report, and subjectively rated measures. Participants in the behavioral treatment condition reported that the treatment was significantly more intrusive than participants in the cognitive-behavioral treatment group. The programmed generalization condition did not produce additional measured benefit. The results are discussed in terms of the overall effectiveness of one-session exposure treatment components for small animal phobias.     

Developing new treatments: on the interplay between theories, experimental science and clinical innovation

It is often argued that behaviour therapy and cognitive-behaviour therapy have a sound theoretical and experimental basis. In the early days of behaviour therapy, the learning theory accounts that were the basis of treatment made clear suggestions about the procedures that were likely to be effective in treatment. In contrast, more recent cognitive-behavioural models tend to specify targets for therapy, but not the procedures that might be optimal for changing the targets. As a consequence, a considerable amount of work has to be done in order to create an effective cognitive-behavioural treatment from a promising cognitive-behavioural model. The process by which cognitive-behavioural treatments are developed is rarely discussed in the literature. For this reason, the way in which one group has used a mixture of phenomenological, experimental and treatment development studies to create effective cognitive therapy programmes for anxiety disorders is described.     

Animals' use of landmarks and metric information to reorient: effects of the size of the experimental space

Disoriented children could use geometric information in combination with landmark information to reorient themselves in large but not in small experimental spaces. We tested fish in the same task and found that they were able to conjoin geometric and non-geometric (landmark) information to reorient themselves in both the large and the small space used. Moreover, fish proved able to reorient immediately when dislocated from a large to a small experimental space and vice versa, suggesting that they encoded the relative rather than the absolute metrics of the environment. However, fish tended to make relatively more errors based on geometric information when transfer occurred from a small to a large space, and to make relatively more errors based on landmark information when transfer occurred from a large to a small space. The hypothesis is discussed that organisms are prepared to use only distant featural information as landmarks.     

Selective attention in social phobia and the moderating effect of a concurrent depressive disorder

Studies using the modified Stroop colour naming task have provided results consistent with the hypothesis that social phobia is associated with an attentional bias towards negative social-evaluative words. However, these results could also have arisen as a consequence of non-attentional processes. For this reason, the present study uses a modified version of MacLeod et al.'s (J. Abnorm. Psychol. 95 (1986) 15) dot-probe task, which provides a more direct measure of attention. Patients with social phobia (n=28), patients with social phobia and a concurrent depressive disorder (n=33), and non-patients (n=40) were presented with word pairs each consisting of a neutral word and a threat word. The results indicated that patients with social phobia show an attentional bias towards social-threat words while non-patients tend to avoid social-threat words. Patients with social phobia and a concurrent depressive disorder behaved like non-patients, indicating that concurrent depression abolishes the attentional bias. Physical threat words were also included in the study. The main analysis indicated that social phobia is also associated with an attentional bias to physical threat. However, a post hoc analysis (which requires replication) suggested that the physical threat bias might have arisen because some social phobia patients also had another anxiety disorder in which physical concerns are likely to have been prominent. Overall, the results emphasise the importance of assessing comorbidity when investigating attentional biases.     

Interpretation and judgmental biases in social phobia

Previous research demonstrated that social phobia is characterized by content-specific interpretation and judgmental biases. The present study investigated whether this interpretation bias occurs not only in ambiguous, but also in positive and negative social events, and whether social phobic patients (SPs) are more characterized by a judgmental bias in costs than in probability. Besides, we argued that the judgmental bias observed in former studies could also be attributed to accurate estimations of SPs (of, for example, stuttering). Therefore, we assessed judgmental bias by the ratings of probability and costs of a negative evaluation (e.g. ‘people dislike me’) and not, as in previous studies, of negative social events (e.g. ‘stuttering’). SPs (n=228) and normal controls (n=33) were presented social and non-social events ranging from positive to profoundly negative. They ranked four different interpretations on likelihood to assess interpretation bias, and rated the profoundly negative interpretation on probability and cost to assess judgmental bias. SPs demonstrated content-specific interpretation and judgmental biases that also occurred in positive and negative social events. In contrast with expectations, SPs were characterized by a judgmental bias in both costs and probability.     

A Review Of Geraldine Jonçich's The Sane Positivist: A Biography Of Edward L. Thorndike

This book review, unfinished at the author's death, examines in historical context Thorndike's law of effect, his Animal Intelligence monograph of 1898, and related works on learning and behavior.     

The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory: Reliability and Validity in an Adolescent Spanish Population

The objective of this study is to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the SPAI in a sample of adolescent Spaniards. The results obtained support the use of the correlated two-factor SPAI subscales and indicate high coefficient alpha values for the SPAI subscales. The results provide support for the use of the SPAI in an adolescent population in a non-English-speaking country. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the Social Phobia subscale showed a four-factor structure, instead of a five-factor dimension, as suggested by previous studies. Effects for gender and age and gender interaction were found. Limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.