Recent Advances in the Treatment of Social Phobia

Social phobia is one of the less studied of the anxiety disorders. While early conceptualisations stressed a lack of social skills as the basic causal mechanism, more‐recent research seems to indicate that these individuals do possess adequate skills. Rather, recent conceptualisations of social phobia stress the importance of distortions in the way such individuals process information related to their own performance and others' evaluations. Based on such conceptualisations, treatment packages which stress cognitive restructuring and in vivo exposure seem to have considerable success. The results of these studies are reviewed and data from the treatment of 30 social phobics are presented. 1993 Australian Psychological Society