Treatment of Social Anxiety Disorder: A Treatments-by-Dimensions Review

This chapter focuses on how various treatments impact specific dimensions of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Many reviews have compared which interventions are the most effective in producing overall clinical improvement. The chapter helps select a treatment when a particular dimension of SAD is prominent in the clinical presentation. It is worth noting that Mattick and colleagues found that greater change in fear of negative evaluation was associated with a more positive treatment outcome. It is reported that improvement in cost estimates for social events accounted for a substantial portion of the variance in posttreatment symptoms of SAD. However, more evidence for the importance of change in probability biases than cost biases is found.