The self in social phobia: an experimental investigation of the roles of self-perception and self-organisation in maintaining social anxiety. (360G-Wellcome-079794_Z_06_Z)

Social phobia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder. While recent cognitive models have improved treatment, significant numbers of patients remain symptomatic post-treatment. This research programme examines how distortions in self-view maintain social anxiety by examining the roles of self-esteem andtype of self-organisation in social anxiety. The research uses novel training paradigms that manipulate cognitive biases in order to test the hypotheses. The causal role of reduced positive self-esteem is examined first by temporarily training low socially anxious individuals to have either increasedor reduced positive self-esteem and then testing the effect of these manipulations on their social anxiety. The next step is to train more positiveself-esteem in high socially anxious individuals and then to evaluate whether prolonged training reduces anxiety in social situations. In the next phase of the research, we examine whether self-organisation influences anxiety by examining the relationship between integrated and compartmentalised types of self-organisation (i.e. the ways in which people organise self-knowledge) and