BACKGROUND Anxiety disorders are commonly comorbid with bipolar disorder (BP) and may worsen course of illness, but differential impact of specific anxiety disorders in men and women remains unknown. METHODS We measured the impact of comorbid panic disorder (PD), social phobia, specific phobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in 460 women and 276 men with Bipolar I Disorder (BPI) or s...

To evaluate the relationship between the childhood temperament behavioral inhibition (BI) and anxiety symptomology, we investigated differences in retrospective reports of childhood BI among undergraduates reporting one of the following: (a) Social anxiety (n = 10), (b) generalized anxiety (n = 13), (c) both social and generalized anxiety (n = 15), and (d) minimal social and generalized anxiety...

The aim of this study was to analyze gender and age differences in adolescents' social anxiety in the factor scores of the Social Phobia subscale from the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SP-SPAI): Social Interactions, Focus of Attention, Cognitive and Somatic Symptoms and Avoidance and Escape Behaviors. The sample consisted of 2,543 students of Secondary Education between 12 and 17 years. ...

Using an experimental design, we analysed differences in the occurrence of cognitive-evaluative distortions and performance deficits across children with social anxiety disorder, with subclinical anxiety and without any anxiety symptoms. Twenty-one children with full syndrome social phobia, 18 children with partial syndrome social phobia and 20 children without any symptoms of social phobia wer...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine the sources of comorbidity for social phobia and dimensional representations of avoidant personality disorder by estimating to what extent the two disorders are influenced by common genetic and shared or unique environmental factors versus the extent to which these factors are specific to each disorder. METHOD Young adult female-female twin...

BACKGROUND Altered memory processes are thought to be a key mechanism in the etiology of anxiety disorders, but little is known about the neural correlates of fear learning and memory biases in patients with social phobia. The present study therefore examined whether patients with social phobia exhibit different patterns of neural activation when confronted with recently acquired emotional stim...

Relations between adult anxiety and mood disorders and retrospective reports of excessive childhood shyness were investigated in the US National Comorbidity, Survey (n=5877). Results indicated that 26% of women and 19% of men described themselves as 'very shy' when they were growing up. Of these shy individuals, 53% of women and 40% of men met criteria for a lifetime diagnosis of one or more an...

Theories of anxiety disorders and phobias have ascribed a critical role to avoidance behavior in explaining the persistence of fear and anxiety, but knowledge about the role of avoidance behavior in the maintenance of anxiety in social anxiety disorder relative to specific phobia is lacking. This study examined the extent to which avoidance behavior moderates the relationship between general an...

BACKGROUND Self-help for social phobia has not received controlled empirical evaluation. AIMS To evaluate the efficacy of pure self-help through written materials for severe social phobia and self-help augmented by five group sessions with a therapist. These conditions were compared with a waiting-list control and standard, therapist-led group therapy. METHOD Participants with severe genera...