Attention re-training for social phobia

All participants will be completing our highly efficacious, best-practice Cognitive Behavioural Group program for Social Phobia. The program consists of 12 weekly sessions, each of approximately 2.5 hours duration, conducted over consecutive weeks. This enhanced group program has been developed through an National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funded Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) at our clinic and has been shown to have treatment effects superior to standard treatment packages for social phobia. Treatment will be led by a clinical psychologist or graduate student in clinical psychology in groups of between six to eight participants. In addition to all participants receiving the best available treatment through our clinic, each group of participants will also be block allocated to receive either active attention re-training, or a placebo attention task as an adjunct to treatment. In both conditions participants will be required to complete an attention task approximately ten minutes in length which is delivered via a computer program. This task will be conducted at the beginning of each group session at the clinic, and is then completed as homework by the participants on their personal computer for the subsequent six days prior to the next session. Participants will each be provided with a USB flash drive from which they can both run the program and save their data (coded by a de-identified number) for retrieval by the research assistant. Arrangements will be made to loan computers to those participants who do not have a computer at home. The attention re-training task involves simultaneous presentation of a socially threatening word (e.g. foolish) with a neutral word (e.g. portion) followed by a probe in the position of one of these words. Participants are instructed to indicate the position of the probe as quickly as possible using the left and right arrow key on their keyboard. In the condition designed to train attention away from threat the probe will always replace the neutral verbal cue. In the placebo condition the probe will appear in the position vacated by the threatening or neutral cue with equal probability. Thus participants in the placebo condition will experience all the same training contexts as those in the re-training condition, but will not be trained to focus away from threat. Four weeks after the final session of the 12 week group program all participants will be complete the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule 4th Edition (ADIS IV) and the same battery of measures that was collected at the initial assessment. This same procedure will also be completed six months after the date of group completion. Any participants who require further follow-up at the completion of the program will be provided with suitable referral options for ongoing care.