Developing of a social-cognitive treatment program for anxiety disorders and evaluation its effectiveness on symptoms of social anxiety

Social anxiety disorder is defined as the fear of social situations and performance. It would be evoked with anxiety, negative thoughts, and emotions either under real circumstances or the prediction of future experience of the reiterated situations. The goal of the present study was to developing of a social-cognitive treatment program for anxiety disorders and evaluation its effectiveness on symptoms of social anxiety.

The study was designed as a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study conducted with a control group and follow-up. The population includes adolescents aged from 13 to 15 who were diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and their mothers gathered in district 5 in Tehran city in 2018. A sample of 32 participants was selected by the convenience sampling method and assigned to experimental and control groups. The instrument of the study included social anxiety questionnaire for adolescents (Lajerka & Lopez, 1998). The social-cognitive treatment program for anxiety disorder was conducted on the experimental group in twelve 60-minutes-sessions and the control group did not receive any intervention. At the end of the 12 sessions, both experimental and control groups were assessed by posttest and follow-up. To evaluate the obtained data, multivariate analysis of variance and T-test were utilized.

The results indicated that there is a significant difference between control and experimental groups in their social anxiety symptoms (p< 0.01). Furthermore, the results of paired samples T-test illustrated that the impact of the social-cognitive treatment program for anxiety disorder on social anxiety disorder was consistent until the follow-up.

with regards to the present study`s findings, it can be concluded that the designed intervention program emphasizing an adolescent`s capability, awareness, insight, and change in their lifestyle, can reduce the social anxiety symptoms in adolescents.