Social Anxiety Disorders: A Case Study

Anxiety disorders are becoming increasingly common in society, and are characterized by common symptoms of fear over future events or the consequences of current ones. This fear is often debilitating in the afflicted person, and is a hindrance to normative behaviour. Certain anxiety disorders originate in childhood and adolescence, and they may persist into adulthood without treatment. One anxiety disorder with particularly negative implications is social anxiety disorder. Social anxiety disorders in children occur when a child exhibits an intense fear to situations where they may be perceived to be inadequate in the presence of others. This disorder, also known as social phobia, often leads to severe impairment and disruption of daily life …show more content…
This treatment works to identify the negative thoughts, and then exposes the distortion as an unrealistic possibility. Following this, techniques are taught to replace negative self-perception with positive thoughts. Behavioural applications come about by instructing the patient to reinforce positive cognitions, thereby increasing their occurrence frequencies. This method is commonly employed as treatment for multiple anxiety disorders, as well as OCD and depression. It is important to consider the effectiveness of these procedures to ensure successful alleviation of the symptoms of the disorder. The efficiency of CBT will be evaluated by considering one procedure that is cognitive-based and another that uses an intense group-based approach to therapy. Long-term benefits of the therapy will be examined, in addition to predictors of different outcomes for …show more content…
It consisted of recognizing anxious thoughts, modifying the cognitions, role-playing adaptive behaviours, and exposure to the anxiety-inducing situations within the clinic. Chi-square tests and ANOVA tests used to analyze pretreatment data showed no difference in participants. A repeated measure multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant improvement in symptoms in the post-test. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses revealed that higher levels of anxiety in pretreatment predicted greater reduction in symptoms later. Reducing maladaptive coping strategies decreased anxiety only when there was a reduction of self-consciousness; depression was found to have no impact on treatment outcomes. The findings suggest that emotional regulation techniques should be included in CBT in order to improve symptoms. However, this study was limited by the small number of predictor variables, the use of statistical measures with narrowed scales, and the unrepresentative age