UD to test treatment for social anxiety Imagine a person who has worked in an office for a number of years but has never used the employee lunchroom because he’s afraid his hand will shake when he drinks and people will make fun of him.

Psychologist Robert Simons (right) discusses a research project with grad student Jason Moser.

3:57 p.m., Oct. 22, 2004--Imagine a person who has worked in an office for a number of years but has never used the employee lunchroom because he’s afraid his hand will shake when he drinks and people will make fun of him.

Or, a woman who is very social, but her husband won’t accompany her to parties because he’s afraid he’ll say something stupid and people will talk about him behind his back.

It’s a psychological disorder called social anxiety, and it limits the lives of those who suffer from it.

Robert Simons, UD professor of psychology, has been studying social anxiety for years and has arranged for UD’s research psychology clinic to be one of the first to test a new treatment developed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety by Edna B. Foa, director of the center.

“Some people are paralyzed by their fears. They think they will humiliate themselves, that they are going to do something so embarrassing that people will laugh at them and talk behind their backs,” Simons said.

But, when the behavior of socially anxious people is observed, they act just as everyone else. Their fears are based on misperceptions, he said.

After years of research, Foa and her associates at Penn have developed a treatment plan. Now, they want to disseminate the treatment package to other university psychology programs by training faculty and staff at other schools in the area.

“We’re going to be trained at the center by their team during this semester. They want to see if the treatment can be successfully taught. We’ll start with two students and myself,” Simons said.

He said, they ran an ad in UD’s student newspaper, The Review, to get subjects asking for individuals who suffer with social anxiety to take part in the treatment program. Several students and members of the community responded.

The work will be done under Simon’s supervision in UD’s Psychological Services Training Center at Belmont Hall, a clinic run by psychology graduate students in training. The center caters to the community’s mental health services needs.

“If we can train young therapists to be as effective as they have been at Penn, Foa and her colleagues will know they have done a good job at disseminating this information,” Simons said.

The treatment is a 16-session plan of activities designed to expose sufferers to what they’re afraid of, Simons said. Clients attend two sessions a week for eight weeks.

Simons called it the first step in ridding those suffering from social anxiety of their fears.

The use of cognitive behavior therapy allows the client to recognize how he or she interprets what others are thinking and to realize that his or her fear has no basis in fact. “People are afraid of mice. Why? They’ve never been bitten by a mouse; a mouse has never done them any harm. You never know why a person developed the fear in the first place, so the intervention treats the symptoms.”

A therapist is present for all of the treatment sessions, including the ones where the client watches a videotape recorded at an event in which he or she ordinarily would never participate. The client gets to see himself or herself functioning no differently than anyone else in those situations.

Simons said that they should have some idea how effective the treatment package is by January.

Article by Barbara Garrison
Photo by Kathy Atkinson

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