Phobias are characterized by excessive fear, cued by the presence or anticipation of a fearful situation. Whereas it is well established that glucocorticoids are released in fearful situations, it is not known whether these hormones, in turn, modulate perceived fear. As extensive evidence indicates that elevated glucocorticoid levels impair the retrieval of emotionally arousing information, the...

OBJECTIVE To analyse the severity of various symptoms and the developmental life history in social phobia. To estimate the value of ETS in the treatment of chronic social phobia. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING Clinic for Psychoneurology and Surgery in Tampere, Finland. SUBJECTS Consecutive series of patients (n = 51). INTERVENTIONS Endoscopic thoracic sympathicotomy. MAIN OUTCOME M...

Studies using facial emotional expressions as stimuli partially support the assumption of biased processing of social signals in social phobia. This pilot study explored for the first time whether individuals with social phobia display a processing bias towards emotional prosody. Fifteen individuals with generalized social phobia and fifteen healthy controls (HC) matched for gender, age, and ed...

The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) is a commonly used self-report measure of social phobia that has demonstrated adequate reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity. However, research has yet to address whether this measure functions equivalently in (a) individuals with and without a diagnosis of social phobia and (b) males and females. E...

Flying phobia is a highly prevalent anxiety disorder, which causes sufferers significant distress and life interference. The processes which maintain flying phobia remain poorly understood. A systematic search of the literature was performed to identify what research has been conducted into the processes which may be involved in the fear of flying and whether processes which are believed to mai...

201 © 2008 EMDR International Association DOI: 10.1891/1933-3196.2.3.201 D evelopment-related fears are normal in childhood (Field & Davey, 2001). During infancy, children tend to fear stimuli within their immediate environment such as loud noises, objects, and separation from a caretaker. When, however, a fear continues and is provoked by the presence or anticipation of a certain object or a s...

Blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia differs from other subtypes of specific phobia in that it is associated with elevated disgust-sensitivity as well as specific autonomic and brain responses during processing of phobia-relevant stimuli. To what extent these features play a role already during threat anticipation is unclear. In the current fMRI experiment, 16 female BII phobics and 16 female he...

The psychometric adequacy of the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS; R. P. Mattick & J. C. Clark, 1989), a measure of social interaction anxiety, and the Social Phobia Scale (SPS; R. E Mattick & J. C. Clarke, 1989), a measure of anxiety while being observed by others, was evaluated in anxious patients and normal controls. Social phobia patients scored higher on both scales and were more lik...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The majority of patients with social phobia reports experiencing negative images, usually linked to memories of earlier aversive social experiences. Several studies have indicated that such negative self-imagery appears to have a causal role in maintaining social phobia, which suggests that interventions aimed at dealing with these images could be beneficial in the tre...