Enhanced treatment for social phobia through the incorporation of attentional re-training. [ 2007 - 2009 ]

Research Grant

Researchers: Prof Ronald Rapee (Principal investigator)

Brief description Social phobia is a serious difficulty that can cause tremendous interference in an individual's life. Social phobia can interfere with an individual's social and romantic life, work and study aspirations, and even increase medical and other psychological problems. Psychological programs to help individuals manage their anxiety have been developed and shown to lead to relatively strong positive outcomes. Recent theoretical understanding has suggested that one maintaining factor in social phobia may be these people's tendency to focus onto negative information. In some exciting developments, several researchers have shown that simply training people with social phobia to focus their attention away from negative information, with no other treatment components, can produce a marked change in their fears. Therefore it makes sense that incorporating these methods into current standard treatment packages, may increase their effectiveness. The current study aims to compare the current best practice treatment package for social phobia with a combination of this package plus the recent attention re-training methods. It is expected that incorporating attention re-training into standard treatment with significantly improve its effects.

Funding Amount $AUD 465,162.94

Funding Scheme NHMRC Project Grants

Notes Standard Project Grant