The authors investigated the prevalence of DIS-ascertained DSM-III psychiatric disorders occurring in 28 patients with dystonia and 28 patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD). In patients with dystonia, lifetime prevalences of major depression (25.0%), bipolar disorder (7.1%), atypical bipolar disorder (7.1%), social phobia (17.9%), and generalized anxiety disorder (25.0%) were significantly mor...

This paper provides a critical review of the prevalence of social phobia in European countries, a description of associated disability and burden and of clinical correlates and risk factors associated with social phobia. On the basis of a comprehensive literature search we identified 21 community studies and two primary care studies. The median lifetime and 12-month prevalence rates of social p...

Submitted: July 29, 2013; Accepted: November 2, 2013 Hummadi and AlObaidi I represents a model of the challenging mental health needs of children in conflict-affected, low-income countries. Long-term instability, violent conflict and wars undermine health and mental health status of people in Iraq, particularly children, who form half its population. Raising the level of knowledge and recogniti...

The authors used a modified Stroop task to study how people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) process threatening information. Participants were motor vehicle accident (MVA) survivors with either PTSD (n = 15), simple phobia of driving (n = 15), or low anxiety (n = 15). Participants named colors of 4 types of words: strong threat words (MVA related), mild threat words (MVA related), pos...

Twenty-four women with spider phobia and 45 nonphobic women completed the Disgust Questionnaire (DQ; P. Rozin, A. E. Fallon, & R. Mandell, 1984) and the Spider Phobia Questionnaire (SPQ; R. Klorman, T. C. Weerts, J. E. Hastings, B. G. Melamed, & P. J. Lang, 1974). Participants also underwent behavioral tests concerning disgust sensitivity and fear of spiders. Spider phobic women showed stronger...

In the current study, event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses were measured in individuals meeting diagnostic criteria for social phobia, depression, their combination, or neither in order to examine the unique and combined effects of social phobia and depression on the interpretation of ambiguous social scenarios. ERPs revealed a lack of positive interpretation bias and some s...

Sixty-seven individuals with social phobia (social anxiety disorder) and 60 healthy controls rated their perceived standing relative to others on 13 self-attribute dimensions, their level of certainty concerning those standings, and the importance of each dimension. As expected, individuals with social phobia provided self-ratings that were significantly more negative than controls across all d...

Cognitive models of social phobia stress the importance of a negatively biased mental representation of ones social performance and appearance in maintenance of the disorder. People with social phobia (N=57) and non-clinical controls (N=41) engaged in a public speech and also completed several measures of perceived attributes including speech performance, physical attractiveness, and personal p...

In a 6-month follow-up study, a change in alexithymia was examined in two samples of 26 patients with panic disorder and 24 patients with social phobia. Before psychiatric treatment, the prevalence rate of alexithymia, measured by the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), was higher for both panic disorder (54%) and social phobia (58%) groups than for healthy persons (15%). After treatmen...

This study investigated the existence of DSM-IV social phobia subtype models in the community. Data came from the Dresden Predictor Study of a representative sample of 1877 German women (aged 18-24 years) who completed a diagnostic interview and filled out various self-report questionnaires. The number of feared social situations was distributed continuously without a clear-cut for delineation ...