The Validity of Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology, Self-report and the Association of Depression with Professional Help-seeking among Individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 188
Author(s):  
Chao-Cheng Lin ◽  
Jian-Ting Chen ◽  
Yi-Ting Lin ◽  
Huai-Hsuan Tseng ◽  
An-Sheng Lin ◽  
...  
2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Da Eun Suh ◽  
Kyung-Ah Chang ◽  
Ji Un Hwang ◽  
Jung-Hye Kwon

AbstractBackground:Previous studies have indicated that people with social anxiety disorder (SAD) often experience spontaneous, recurrent images (SRI). It was assumed that Koreans with interdependent self-views may contain more features related to social contexts in their self-images than those reported in Western cultures.Aims:In the present study, we aimed to explore the prevalence and content of SRIs in individuals with SAD in Korea. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between features of SRIs and variables of SAD.Method:Sixty-four individuals with SAD (27.00 ± 7.42 years, 64.1% female), diagnosed with SAD, completed self-report questionnaires related to social anxiety. Afterwards, a semi-structured interview was used to assess features and content of the individuals’ SRI.Results:Thirty (47%) of the participants reported experiencing SRIs in social situations. The content of the SRIs were classified under three themes: negative self-images, negative images of others, and abstract images. The distress level of SRIs was positively associated with social phobia scales (r = .385, p < .05) and physical anxiety symptoms (r = .478, p < .05). Frequency of SRIs was positively associated with avoidance scores (r = .402, p < .05).Conclusions:The results demonstrated differences in the prevalence and content of the SRIs between Western and non-Western cultures. Fewer individuals with SAD in Korea reported having SRIs, and the content of these SRIs involved people other than the self. Some features of SRIs were associated with variables of SAD.


2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. I. ZAIDER ◽  
R. G. HEIMBERG ◽  
D. M. FRESCO ◽  
F. R. SCHNEIER ◽  
M. R. LIEBOWITZ

Background. The clinical Global Impression Scale (CGI) is commonly used as a primary outcome measure in studies evaluating the efficacy of treatments for anxiety disorders. The current study evaluated the psychometric properties and predictors of clinicians' ratings on an adapted version of the CGI among individuals with social anxiety disorders.Method. An independent assessor administered the CGI Severity of Illness and Improvement ratings to 123 patients at baseline and the subset of treated patients again mid- and post-treatment.Results. Improvement ratings were strongly related to both concurrent Severity of Illness and changes in Severity of Illness ratings from baseline. Additionally, both CGI ratings were positively correlated with both self-report and clinician-administered measures of social anxiety, depression, impairment and quality of life. Measures of social anxiety symptoms accounted for a large portion of the variance in Severity of Illness ratings, with significant additional variance accounted for by measures of impairment and depression. Changes in social anxiety symptoms from baseline accounted for significant variance in Improvement ratings, but no significant additional variance was accounted for by changes in impairment and depressive symptoms.Conclusions. Our findings support the utility of the CGI as an index of global severity and symptom-specific improvement among individuals with social anxiety disorder.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Di Matteo ◽  
Wendy Wang ◽  
Kathryn Fotinos ◽  
Sachinthya Lokuge ◽  
Julia Yu ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The ability to objectively measure the severity of depression and anxiety disorders in a passive manner could have a profound impact on the way in which these disorders are diagnosed, assessed, and treated. Existing studies have demonstrated links between both depression and anxiety and the linguistic properties of words that people use to communicate. Smartphones offer the ability to passively and continuously detect spoken words to monitor and analyze the linguistic properties of speech produced by the speaker and other sources of ambient speech in their environment. The linguistic properties of automatically detected and recognized speech may be used to build objective severity measures of depression and anxiety. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine if the linguistic properties of words passively detected from environmental audio recorded using a participant’s smartphone can be used to find correlates of symptom severity of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and general impairment. METHODS An Android app was designed to collect periodic audiorecordings of participants’ environments and to detect English words using automatic speech recognition. Participants were recruited into a 2-week observational study. The app was installed on the participants’ personal smartphones to record and analyze audio. The participants also completed self-report severity measures of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and functional impairment. Words detected from audiorecordings were categorized, and correlations were measured between words counts in each category and the 4 self-report measures to determine if any categories could serve as correlates of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, or general impairment. RESULTS The participants were 112 adults who resided in Canada from a nonclinical population; 86 participants yielded sufficient data for analysis. Correlations between word counts in 67 word categories and each of the 4 self-report measures revealed a strong relationship between the usage rates of death-related words and depressive symptoms (<i>r</i>=0.41, <i>P</i>&lt;.001). There were also interesting correlations between rates of word usage in the categories of reward-related words with depression (<i>r</i>=–0.22, <i>P</i>=.04) and generalized anxiety (<i>r</i>=–0.29, <i>P</i>=.007), and vision-related words with social anxiety (<i>r</i>=0.31, <i>P</i>=.003). CONCLUSIONS In this study, words automatically recognized from environmental audio were shown to contain a number of potential associations with severity of depression and anxiety. This work suggests that sparsely sampled audio could provide relevant insight into individuals’ mental health. CLINICALTRIAL


2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raul Rivero ◽  
LuisJoaquin Garcia-Lopez ◽  
Stefan G. Hofmann

Contemporary theories of social anxiety emphasize the role of cognitive processes. Although social anxiety disorder is one of the most common mental health problems in adolescents, there are very few self-report instruments available to measure cognitive processes related to social anxiety in adolescents, let alone non-English instruments. The Self-Statements During Public Speaking Scale (SSPS; Hofmann & DiBartolo, 2000 ) is a brief self-report measure designed to assess self-statements related to public speaking, the most commonly feared social performance situation. In order to fill this gap in the literature, we translated the SSPS into Spanish and administered it to 1,694 adolescents from a community sample, a clinical sample composed of 71 subjects with a principal diagnosis of social anxiety disorder, and a clinical control group consisting of 154 patients. The scale showed good psychometric properties, supporting the use of the Spanish version of the SSPS in adolescents.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham R Thew ◽  
Candice LYM Powell ◽  
Amy PL Kwok ◽  
Mandy H Lissillour Chan ◽  
Jennifer Wild ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Guided internet-based psychological interventions show substantial promise for expanding access to evidence-based mental health care. However, this can only be achieved if results of tightly controlled studies from the treatment developers can also be achieved in other independent settings. This dissemination depends critically on developing efficient and effective ways to train professionals to deliver these interventions. Unfortunately, descriptions of therapist training and its evaluation are often limited or absent within dissemination studies. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to describe and evaluate a program of therapist training to deliver internet-based Cognitive Therapy for social anxiety disorder (iCT-SAD). As this treatment was developed in the United Kingdom and this study was conducted in Hong Kong with local therapists, an additional objective was to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and initial efficacy of iCT-SAD in this cultural context, based on data from a pilot case series. METHODS Training in iCT-SAD was provided to 3 therapists and included practice of the face-to-face format of therapy under clinical supervision, training workshops, and treating 6 patients with the iCT-SAD program. Training progress was evaluated using standardized and self-report measures and by reviewing patient outcomes. In addition, feedback from patients and therapists was sought regarding the feasibility and acceptability of the program. RESULTS The training program was effective at increasing therapists’ iCT-SAD knowledge and skills, resulting in levels of competence expected of a specialist Cognitive Behavioral Therapy practitioner. The 6 patients treated by the trainees all completed their treatment and achieved a mean pre- to posttreatment change of 53.8 points (SD 39.5) on the primary patient outcome measure, the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. The within-group effect size (Cohen d) was 2.06 (95% CI 0.66-3.46). There was evidence to suggest that the patients’ clinical outcomes were sustained at 3-month follow-up. These clinical results are comparable to those achieved by UK patients treated by the developers of the internet program. Patient and therapist feedback did not identify any major cultural barriers to implementing iCT-SAD in Hong Kong; some modest language suggestions were made to assist understanding. CONCLUSIONS The therapist training implemented here facilitated the successful dissemination of an effective UK-developed internet intervention to Hong Kong. The treatment appeared feasible and acceptable in this setting and showed highly promising initial efficacy. A randomized controlled trial is now required to examine this more robustly. As therapist training is critical to the successful dissemination of internet interventions, further research to develop, describe, and evaluate therapist training procedures is recommended.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Di Matteo ◽  
Kathryn Fotinos ◽  
Sachinthya Lokuge ◽  
Julia Yu ◽  
Tia Sternat ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND <i>Objective</i> and <i>continuous</i> severity measures of anxiety and depression are highly valuable and would have many applications in psychiatry and psychology. A collective source of data for objective measures are the sensors in a person’s smartphone, and a particularly rich source is the microphone that can be used to sample the audio environment. This may give broad insight into activity, sleep, and social interaction, which may be associated with quality of life and severity of anxiety and depression. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to explore the properties of passively recorded environmental audio from a subject’s smartphone to find potential correlates of symptom severity of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and general impairment. METHODS An Android app was designed, together with a centralized server system, to collect periodic measurements of the volume of sounds in the environment and to detect the presence or absence of English-speaking voices. Subjects were recruited into a 2-week observational study during which the app was run on their personal smartphone to collect audio data. Subjects also completed self-report severity measures of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and functional impairment. Participants were 112 Canadian adults from a nonclinical population. High-level features were extracted from the environmental audio of 84 participants with sufficient data, and correlations were measured between the 4 audio features and the 4 self-report measures. RESULTS The regularity in daily patterns of activity and inactivity inferred from the environmental audio volume was correlated with the severity of depression (<i>r</i>=−0.37; <i>P</i>&lt;.001). A measure of sleep disturbance inferred from the environmental audio volume was also correlated with the severity of depression (<i>r</i>=0.23; <i>P</i>=.03). A proxy measure of social interaction based on the detection of speaking voices in the environmental audio was correlated with depression (<i>r</i>=−0.37; <i>P</i>&lt;.001) and functional impairment (<i>r</i>=−0.29; <i>P</i>=.01). None of the 4 environmental audio-based features tested showed significant correlations with the measures of generalized anxiety or social anxiety. CONCLUSIONS In this study group, the environmental audio was shown to contain signals that were associated with the severity of depression and functional impairment. Associations with the severity of social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder were much weaker in comparison and not statistically significant at the 5% significance level. This work also confirmed previous work showing that the presence of voices is associated with depression. Furthermore, this study suggests that sparsely sampled audio volume could provide potentially relevant insight into subjects’ mental health.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Horng ◽  
Meredith E. Coles

This study was designed to clarify the discrepancy between data showing higher self-reported levels of social anxiety in Asian Americans (Horng, 2004; Okazaki, 1997, 2000, 2002) but lower lifetime prevalence rates of social anxiety disorder (SAD) in Asian Americans compared to Caucasian Americans (Hwu, Yeh, & Chang, 1989; Lee et al., 1990b; Takeuchi et al., 1998). Results revealed that based on responses on the self-report Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), Asian Americans endorsed higher levels of social anxiety symptoms and were more likely to meet a threshold for “high social anxiety,” using the diagnostic cutoff score of 19 or higher on the SPIN. However, when clinician-formulated diagnoses were assigned, there was no evidence for significant differences in the prevalence of SAD in Asian Americans versus Caucasian Americans. Explanation of the results, their implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 970-980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Joaquín Garcia-Lopez ◽  
Rosa Mª Bermejo ◽  
Mª Dolores Hidalgo

Availability of brief, self-report measures to be used as screening instruments is crucial to detect correctly youth with social anxiety disorder and therefore, reach those otherwise under-detected and under-treated. A previous study revealed that the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) was potentially an appropriate measure for screening social anxiety among US adolescents. However, there is a lack of information concerning its properties as a screening test in other cultures and languages. This is the main objective of this study, although further validity of the scale is provided as well. The sample consisted of 192 adolescents (a sample composed of 114 subjects with a principal diagnosis of social anxiety disorder; and a group consisting of 78 subjects with no diagnosis of social phobia). Results suggest that the Social Phobia Inventory has demonstrated good psychometric properties and indeed may be used as a screening tool in Spanish-speaking adolescents.


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