Social phobic beliefs mediate the relationship between post-event processing regarding the worst socially aversive experience and fear of negative evaluation.
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ABSTRACT: Supplementary information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-02805-9.
SUBMITTER: Seinsche RJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8818836 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundAlthough literature provides support for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as an efficacious intervention for social phobia, more research is needed to improve treatments for children.MethodsForty four Caucasian children (ages 8-14) meeting diagnostic criteria of social phobia according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; APA, 1994) were randomly allocated to either a newly developed CBT program focusing on cognition according to the model of Clark and Wells (n = 21) or a wait-list control group (n = 23). The primary outcome measure was clinical improvement. Secondary outcomes included improvements in anxiety coping, dysfunctional cognitions, interaction frequency and comorbid symptoms. Outcome measures included child report and clinican completed measures as well as a diagnostic interview.ResultsSignificant differences between treatment participants (4 dropouts) and controls (2 dropouts) were observed at post test on the German version of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children. Furthermore, in the treatment group, significantly more children were free of diagnosis than in wait-list group at post-test. Additional child completed and clinician completed measures support the results.DiscussionThe study is a first step towards investigating whether CBT focusing on cognition is efficacious in treating children with social phobia. Future research will need to compare this treatment to an active treatment group. There remain the questions of whether the effect of the treatment is specific to the disorder and whether the underlying theoretical model is adequate.ConclusionPreliminary support is provided for the efficacy of the cognitive behavioral treatment focusing on cognition in socially phobic children. Active comparators should be established with other evidence-based CBT programs for anxiety disorders, which differ significantly in their dosage and type of cognitive interventions from those of the manual under evaluation (e.g. Coping Cat).
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Project description:BackgroundThe amygdala is an anatomically complex medial temporal brain structure whose subregions are considered to serve distinct functions. However, their precise role in mediating human aversive experience remains ill understood.MethodsWe used functional magnetic resonance imaging in 39 healthy volunteers with varying levels of trait anxiety to assess distinct contributions of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and centromedial amygdala to anticipation and experience of aversive events. Additionally, we examined the relationship between any identified functional subspecialization and measures of subjective reported aversion and trait anxiety.ResultsOur results show that the centromedial amygdala is responsive to aversive outcomes but insensitive to predictive aversive cues. In contrast, the BLA encodes an aversive prediction error that quantifies whether cues and outcomes are worse than expected. A neural representation within the BLA for distinct threat levels was mirrored in self-reported subjective anxiety across individuals. Furthermore, high trait-anxious individuals were characterized by indiscriminately heightened BLA activity in response to aversive cues, regardless of actual threat level.ConclusionsOur results demonstrate that amygdala subregions are distinctly engaged in processing of aversive experience, with elevated and undifferentiated BLA responses to threat emerging as a potential neurobiological mediator of vulnerability to anxiety disorders.
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