Social Self-Reappraisal Therapy for Social Phobia: Preliminary Findings

The recent psychopathology literature suggests that individuals with social phobia overestimate social standards and are deficient in setting and attaining social goals, have a negative perception of themselves as social objects and show heightened self-focused attention when confronted with social threat. They further overestimate the potential cost of a social encounter, experience their anxiety as uncontrollable and visible to others, view their social skills as inadequate, rely on safety behaviors and avoidance strategies to control their anxiety, and engage in post-event rumination. Traditional cognitive-behavior therapy does not adequately address all of these features of social phobia during treatment. We discuss here an enhanced version of cognitive-behavioral treatment for social phobia, which is specifically designed to address these factors. The results of an uncontrolled pilot study suggest that this new treatment may be more effective than traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy for social phobia.