Conclusion: Anxiety disorders, especially panic disorder and PTSD, are independently associated with suicide attempts. Clinicians need to assess suicidal behavior among patients presenting with anxiety problems. Depression and Anxiety 0:1-8, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. (Source: Depression and Anxiety)MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

A comprehensive evolutionary personality psychology can be developed by identifying individual differences within each of the evolved systems that regulate social behaviour. We developed a questionnaire measure of social rank style, defined as individual differences in preferred strategies for pursuing, defending, and, when necessary, relinquishing social rank. The 17-item Rank Style with Peers Questionnaire (RSPQ) comprises three nearly independent scales: dominant leadership, coalition-building, and ruthless self-advancement. A series of studies demonstrated that: (a) the RSPQ’s, factor structure is robust; (b) the three rank style variables are not redundant with the five-factor traits or adult attachment styles; (c) they are related in theoretically expected ways to adjustment outcom...

CONCLUSION: Consistent with the literature of school based Cognitive-Behavioral Group Treatment (CBGT) programs for social anxiety, it was found that adolescents in the treatment group exhibited a significant decrease in social anxiety and related cognitive errors. PMID: 20204902 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Turkish Journal of Psychiatry)

(Source: Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology)

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common disorder that can lead to significant impairment. In this chapter, the author provides background on the disorder and reviews hypothesized familial and temperamental risk factors. In particular, it highlights the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Longitudinal Study of Children at Risk for Anxiety, now in its fifteenth year, and describes how this study has identified some factors that contribute to risk for SAD. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (Source: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development)

This chapter contains (1) an analysis of commonalities and differences in anxious solitude and social anxiety disorder, and a review of empirical investigations examining (2) correspondence among childhood anxious solitude and anxiety and mood diagnoses and (3) the relation between peer difficulties and temporal stability of anxious solitude and depressive symptoms. Findings support a diathesis-stress model in which anxious solitude forecasts symptoms of psychopathology primarily in the context of interpersonal stress. Additionally, evidence for individual and environmental factors which moderate risk for peer difficulties among anxious solitary children is reviewed. Implications for intervention are discussed. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (Source: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Dev...MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

In this chapter, the authors review the history of the Waterloo Longitudinal Project (WLP), the first longitudinal study (1980-1992) dedicated to the study of social withdrawal, its correlates, and consequences. Theories underlying the WLP are described, as are its empirical findings. Recent research from other labs that has extended the findings of the original WLP is briefly described. The authors' research that draws on the findings of WLP are noted as well. An underlying theme in this work is that relationships (and interactions) with parents and friends can serve as protective or exacerbating factors in the developmental course of social withdrawal and its concomitants (including social anxiety). © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (Source: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development)

Monthly magazines from Reader's Digest to Cosmopolitan are inundated with tips on how to sleep better, find happiness, and weave seriously sexy hair. Taking nothing away from being happy and blowing your romantic partner's mind on valentine's day, there are few things as valuable as staying alive.Sometimes we fail to take life and death seriously. Think back to those painful days of calculus class in high school. Like the sounds of a banshee ripping out its entrails, you and your classmates probably screamed the same screams heard year after year - "I'm so bored, I could die!" And yet, did your calculus teacher care? Did they offer a hug or show the slightest empathy? Probably not. And what about the desperate pleas of innocent children on long, monotonous car rides. All children want is a...

Source: Arch Gen Psychiatry Area: News The results of a randomised double-blind, placebo-controlled trial have found that a combination of phenelzine and cognitive behavioural group therapy (CBGT) is superior to either treatment alone and to placebo for social anxiety disorder (SAD).   To investigate, researchers from two US academic centres randomised 128 adults with a primary DSM-IV diagnosis of SAD to CBGT (n=34), phenelzine sulphate (15-60mg/day; n=35), placebo (n=27), or combined CBGT plus phenelzine (15-60mg/day; n=32). The CBGT sessions took place weekly and were administered by two therapists in twelve 2.5-hour sessions to groups of 4 to 6 participants.   The primary outcome measures were Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale and Clinical Global Impression (CGI) scale s...

Authors: Wonderlich-Tierney AL, Vander Wal JS The current study examined the hypotheses that social support and coping moderate and or mediate the relationship between a broad and a narrow form of social anxiety and eating disorder symptoms. One hundred sixty-nine female undergraduates at a private Midwestern university, completed measures of social support, coping, social anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, and disordered eating attitudes and behaviors. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that higher levels of social support are associated with a weaker association between social anxiety and eating disorder symptomatology. Low use of task- and avoidant-oriented (distraction) coping and increased use of emotion-oriented coping are associated with a stronger...

This study aims to examine social skills through self-reports of children with AS (N = 21) and a matched group of typically developing peers, as well as reports from their mothers, fathers, and teachers. Results showed that children with AS had more social skills deficits according to all raters and that they reported more aggressiveness/antisocial behavior, more conceit/haughtiness, more loneliness/social anxiety, and less assertiveness than controls. The level of agreement between raters varied significantly, suggesting that social skills are best studied with multiple informants. PMID: 20195739 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders)MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

Conclusions A significant range of psychiatric disorders occur after traumatic injury. The identification and treatment of a range of psychiatric disorders are important for optimal adaptation after traumatic injury. (Source: Am J Psychiatry)

Conclusion  Combined phenelzine and CBGT treatment is superior to either treatment alone and to placebo on dimensional measures and on rates of response and remission. (Source: Archives of General Psychiatry)

The link, if any, between creativity and mental illness is one of the most controversial topics in modern creativity research. The present research assessed the relationships between anxiety and depression symptom dimensions and several facets of creativity: divergent thinking, creative self-concepts, everyday creative behaviors, and creative accomplishments. Latent variable models estimated effect sizes and their confidence intervals. Overall, measures of anxiety, depression, and social anxiety predicted little variance in creativity. Few models explained more than 3% of the variance, and the effect sizes were small and inconsistent in direction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts)

In this introductory chapter, guided by developmental psychopathology and developmental science as overarching integrative theoretical frameworks, the authors define three constructs related to social anxiety in childhood (behavioral inhibition, anxious solitude/withdrawal, and social anxiety disorder) and analyze commonalities and differences in the content and assessment of these constructs. They then highlight controversies between developmental and clinical approaches to the definition of these constructs, the role of biology in social anxiety, age of onset of social anxiety, information processing biases in social anxiety, heterogeneity in the social and emotional adjustment of socially anxious children, and targets of intervention for childhood social anxiety. © Wiley Periodicals, I...MedWorm Message: Get the very latest Swine Flu news via the MedWorm Swine Flu RSS news feed - updated hourly from thousands of authoritative health and news sources.

Conclusion: We report for the first time volumetric results in patients with GSP. Future assessment of these patients will clarify whether these changes are reversed after successful treatment and whether they predict treatment response. PMID: 20184810 [PubMed - in process] (Source: J Psychiatry Neurosc...)

The present study examined whether information processing bias against emotional facial expressions is present among individuals with social anxiety. College students with high (high social anxiety group; n = 26) and low social anxiety (low social anxiety group; n = 26) performed three different types of working memory tasks: (a) ordering positive and negative facial expressions according to the intensity of emotion; (b) ordering pictures of faces according to age; and (c) ordering geometric shapes according to size. The high social anxiety group performed significantly more poorly than the low social anxiety group on the facial expression task, but not on the other two tasks with the nonemotional stimuli. These results suggest that high social anxiety interferes with processing of emotion...

The objective of this study was to evaluate community-based outpatient mental health services for young adults. Participants were interviewed at ages 21, 24, 27, and 30. Outcomes included: (1) symptoms of depression, generalized anxiety, social phobia, dysthymia and post traumatic stress individually and as a global scale; and (2) a dichotomous diagnosis variable inclusive of all above disorders. Treatment was indicated by an outpatient visit to a psychiatrist or other professional. Treatment did not reduce mental disorder or symptoms. Substance use, violence, poverty, community disorganization, and family history of antisocial behavior increased risks for negative outcomes, while social support was protective. The absence of positive findings associated with outpatient treatment is ...

Authors: Yen CF, Yang P, Wu YY, Hsu FC, Cheng CP The aims of this study were to examine the factor structure, internal consistency 1 month test-retest reliability and the discriminant validity for the diagnosis of anxiety disorder of the Taiwanese version of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC-T). A total of 12,536 Taiwanese children and adolescents in the community were recruited to examine the adequacy of the original four-factor structure of the MASC-T by confirmatory factor analysis and the internal-consistency reliability by Cronbach's alpha across gender and age. The 1 month test-retest reliability was examined using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) in 105 children and adolescents in the community. The discriminant validity of the MASC-T for the diagnos...

This study's primary goal was to examine relations between symptoms of specific social phobia (SSP), generalized social phobia (GSP), avoidant personality disorder (APD), and panic and depression. Past research has suggested a single social phobia continuum in which SSP displays less symptom severity than GSP or APD. We found SSP symptoms correlated less strongly with depression but more strongly with panic relative to both GSP and APD symptoms. These findings challenge a unidimensional model of social phobia, suggesting a multidimensional model may be more appropriate. These findings also inform current research aimed at classifying mood and anxiety disorders more broadly by identifying that the different factors of fear versus distress appear to underlie different subtypes of social phob...