It is believed in Japan that only psychiatrists are capable of providing reliable psychiatric diagnosis. However, more awareness of mental health issues related to perinatal care means that midwives are now required to have psychiatric diagnostic skills. The purpose of the present paper was to examine how well Japanese midwives agreed with a psychiatrist on diagnoses of different psychiatric di...

This study investigated the relationship between self-appraisals of performance, symptom severity and post-event rumination in social phobia, and evaluated the effect of treatment on these variables. A socially phobic group and a nonanxious control group performed an impromptu speech and were told that their performance would be evaluated. Participants appraised their performance immediately af...

OBJECTIVE This nation-wide register-based study investigated how often phobic disorders (PHO) and co-morbid disorders occur in affected families compared to control families. Furthermore, the study addressed the impact of sex, year of birth, and degree of urbanization in terms of risk factors. METHOD A total of N = 746 child and adolescent psychiatric participants born between 1969 and 1986 a...

In this pilot trial, 15 phobic Asian Americans were randomly assigned to standard one-session treatment (OSTS), culturally adapted one-session treatment (OST-CA), or manualized selfhelp. At posttreatment, OST (combined standard and culturally adapted) led to greater reductions in phobic avoidance and anxiety than self-help. Moreover, analyses comparing the two active treatments showed trends fa...

Virtual reality (VR) offers today a new paradigm for human-computer interaction, in which users are no longer simply external observers of images on a computer screen, but active participants within a computer-generated three-dimensional world. Most of the psychological therapies carried out with the help of virtual reality rely on the principle of exposure. This review surveys the state of the...

Social phobia has been associated with abnormal processing of angry faces, which directly signal disapproval--a situation that social phobics fear. This study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of emotional face processing in socially phobic and non-phobic individuals. Subjects identified either the gender (modified emotional Stroop task) or the expression of angry, happy, or neut...