Therapy for Social Anxiety in Young Individuals

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Recommended: Literature review of treatment of social anxiety

Cognitive-Behavioural Group Therapy for social anxiety in young individuals

Social anxiety is a type of anxiety problem common in children. It is usually described as an overwhelming fear stem from intense feelings of self-consciousness and shyness. Thus, young individuals affected by it may feel extremely discomfort when participating in daily social situations, especially when they were required to perform in unfamiliar social situations. With social anxiety, an individual's life is constantly interfered by fears of embarrassment (Rapee, 1995). Affected individuals might be unable to enjoy social activities and even avoid some of them. Life interference and impairment associated with social anxiety could therefore be severe. Attention for social anxiety significantly increased in early 1990s and cognitive models began to be proposed to explain the maintenance of social anxiety. This has facilitated further investigation into the nature of the maladaptive behavioural pattern as well as corresponding treatments.
The two well-known cognitive behavioural models of social anxiety suggest one’s attention to threat stimuli has an important role in maintaining the social fear (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). Both models suggest that there are a number of beliefs and assumptions of the self and the social world activated when individuals with social anxiety associate themselves with social situations. Necessity to display an excessively high standards for social performance is assumed, otherwise must lead to aversive social consequence.
The two models suggest these underlying social assumptions trigger an attentional shift. Not only those individuals set high standards for themselves, they also sensitive to environmental ...

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...designed to reduce these deficiencies. These techniques include therapist modelling, behavioural rehearsal, corrective feedback, social reinforcement, and homework assignments.
One unique component of the CBGT is a scheduled snack break designed to provide exposure to eating in public and opportunities for practicing social skills. Social skills training may also yield therapeutic effects by giving opportunities to the individuals to practice feared social behaviours repeatedly, and confrontation of feared situations and corrective feedback about the adequacy of one’s social behaviour inherent in the instruction of such skills training.
Regardless, social skills training may be easily combined with other techniques, such as cognitive restructuring or exposure.

Empirical evidence
The efficacy of CBGT has been demonstrated in a number of well-designed studies.

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