A good way to get over social anxiety is to get out and be around people, right? Well thats what...

a lot of therapits assume. We know that people with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) tend to avoid contact with others in an effort to minimise their social anxiety.
This seems fairly obvious. For a long time, psychotherapists have assumed that this avoidance is damaging in the long term and maintains maladaptive behaviour. If people with SAD are not meeting others, then how would they ever overcome their anxiety? Some forms of therapy even advocate that people with anxiety are exposed to whatever it is that theyre anxious about and that this exposure will reduce anxiety over time. But there has never been a rigorous test of this assumption. Mher Chatinyan (Armenian, born 1989)
Roofs of Old Tbilisi
So recently, Rodebaugh, Grossman, Tonge, Shin, Frumkin, Rodrguez, Orti and Piccirillo (2023) conducted a study to test the assumption that social fear and social avoidance would be highly correlated. They made use of longitudinal data in which they followed 32 participants with SAD day by day, in the hope that insights into this issues would be brought to light.
The researchers found that avoidance was indeed strongly related to future anxiety, but only in a minority of people with SAD. So while avoidance does indeed maintain fear in people with SAD, this is only for a minority of these individuals. Overall, there is a big variation in whether this is the case.
While this is only preliminary research, it does suggest that the assumptions of exposure therapy might need revision, at least in the case of avoidance and anxiety in SAD.
Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Jason T. Grossman, Natasha A. Tonge, Jin Shin, Madelyn R. Frumkin, Chavez R. Rodriguez, Esteban G. Ortiz & Marilyn L. Piccirillo (2024) Avoidance and fear day by day in social anxiety disorder, Psychotherapy Research
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