Enhanced treatment for social phobia through the incorporation of attentional re-training.

Funded Activity Summary

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.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2007

End Date: 01-01-2009

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $465,162.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Mental Health

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

Anxiety | Anxiety Disorders | Anxiety disorders | Mental health | Social phobia | mental health | self help

Related Links