The current study examined the tripartite model of anxiety and depression in relation to social phobia in a nonclinical sample of adolescents (ages 13-17). Adolescent/parent dyads participated in a semistructured interview and completed self-report measures of the tripartite constructs and social anxiety. Adolescents gave an impromptu speech, and heart rate was monitored. Low positive affect, h...

Social isolation of rats during the early part of development increases social anxiety-like behavior in adulthood. Furthermore, early-life social isolation increases the levels of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) receptors in the serotonergic dorsal raphe nucleus (dRN) of adult rats. Interactions between serotonin and CRF systems are thought to mediate anxiety behavior. Therefore, we invest...

Anxiety is a prevalent mental health issue for individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). Relatively little is known about the developmental course of anxiety, or how it links with core features of WS, namely social and executive functioning (EF). In this study, parent-reports of anxiety were compared across a 4-year period (N = 17), and links between anxiety, social and EF were explored from con...

OBJECTIVE The authors critically surveyed several preclinical and clinical neurobiological models of social anxiety disorder. METHOD The authors reviewed the recent literature regarding three animal models of particular relevance to social anxiety. They then examined the recent literature concerning clinical neurobiological aspects of social anxiety disorder, including the developmental neuro...

BACKGROUND Participation in drinking games is associated with excessive drinking and alcohol risks. Despite the growing literature documenting the ubiquity and consequences of drinking games, limited research has examined the influence of psychosocial factors on the experience of negative consequences as the result of drinking game participation. OBJECTIVES The current event-level study exami...

BACKGROUND Social anxiety disorder is common and typically starts in childhood or adolescence. Cognitive Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder (CT-SAD) in adults is a well-established treatment that shows strong evidence of differential effectiveness when compared to other active treatments. In contrast, CBT approaches to social anxiety in young people have yet to demonstrate differential effecti...

Cognitive restructuring and exposure therapy have been integrated into a highly structured package for the treatment of social phobia termed cognitive-behavioral group therapy (CBGT). The first two sessions of CBGT for social phobia are devoted to training clients in the basic tenets of cognitive therapy. Clients learn to identify their own irrational thoughts and to challenge the content of th...

Models of social anxiety and depression in youth have been developed separately, and they contain similar etiological influences. Given the high comorbidity of social anxiety and depression, we examine whether the posited etiological constructs are a correlate of, or a risk factor for, social anxiety and/or depression at the symptom level and the diagnostic level. We find core risk factors of t...

Animal models and clinical trials in humans suggest that probiotics can have an anxiolytic effect. However, no studies have examined the relationship between probiotics and social anxiety. Here we employ a cross-sectional approach to determine whether consumption of fermented foods likely to contain probiotics interacts with neuroticism to predict social anxiety symptoms. A sample of young adul...

Data from self-report and observational studies make it clear that problematic social anxiety confers interpersonal constraint that may contribute to the interpersonal dysfunction reported by individuals with social anxiety disorder. Direct observation of interpersonal behavior in established relationships is rare and difficult to obtain for practical reasons. We tested a flexible iterated pris...