Social anxiety refers to fears of social interaction and/or performance situations. When social anxiety is accompanied by significant distress or impairment in one’s social life, work, or education, an individual is said to “have” Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). Although social anxiety is a ubiquitous phenomenon, the current psychiatric diagnostic system …

Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) for anxiety disorders typically involves clients confronting the anxiety-inducing objects and situations they would typically wish to avoid. Through repeated exposure to anxiety, clients increasingly learn to question, review and correct their anxious appraisals and beliefs and gradually experience less anxiety over time. However, certain individual characteristics …

The World Health Organization reports that close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year (1). E-health resources allow people to access mental health information and resources at any time and from any place – something which is particularly important in rural and remote areas where access to services …

The 2017 journal impact factors have now been released. Cognitive behaviour therapy increased its impact factor from 2.13 to 2.26. The number is based on 2264 (vs. 2129) citations made to papers published in the journal in the previous 2 years. Check the latest impact factors for other journals at …

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a psychological treatment that has a strong scientific support of effectiveness for several psychiatric disorders, primarily anxiety disorders. However, at present there is no overall agreement on what counts as ‘CBT’. One reason is that CBT is commonly perceived as including a broad range of …

Mounting evidence indicates that pain can motivate cigarette smoking behavior, smokers have reliably endorsed the use of tobacco to cope with pain, and there is reason to suspect that pain may impede smoking cessation. Smoking-related outcome expectancies are among the best predictors of cigarette consumption and relapse, and the goal …

Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) has been understood as a dispositional tendency to view the presence of negative events as unacceptable and threatening, regardless of the likelihood of those events occurring. The preference over the 12-item vs. 27-item of the IUS has been central to debate. The goals of the present …

Psychological inflexibility and experiential avoidance are equivalent (with somewhat different connotations) concepts and refer to an unwillingness to remain in contact with particular private events. This concept is most often measured by the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-II) and is strongly related to psychopathology and behavioral effectiveness. In this study, …

Culturally validated rating scales for social anxiety disorder (SAD) are of significant importance when screening for the disorder, as well as for evaluating treatment efficacy. This study examined construct validity and additional psychometric properties of two commonly used scales, the Social Phobia Scale and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, in …

The International Intrusive Thought Interview Schedule (IITIS) was used to assess and compare the unwanted intrusive thoughts (UITs) reported in a group of patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and a non-clinical group. Although all participants reported at least one type of intrusion, OCD patients experienced more intrusive thoughts than …

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the two first-line treatments for depression, but little is known about their effects on quality of life (QOL). A meta-analysis was conducted to examine changes in QOL in adults with major depressive disorder who received CBT (24 studies examining 1969 …

Despite the well-documented efficacy of cognitive behavioral treatments for anxiety disorders, the acceptability of these treatments remains an under-researched area. A better understanding of acceptability could help to improve the initiation of, and engagement in, these effective interventions. Recent research has suggested computerized interventions of anxiety-related risk factors may be …

Clinically significant premenstrual symptoms (PMS) is conceptualized as a depressive disorder in DSM-5, however, it may share pathophysiological processes with anxiety- and fear-related disorders. Specifically, women with PMS panic at higher rates during biological challenge procedures. It is unclear if this increased interoceptive sensitivity is a general vulnerability or specific …

The hierarchical model of vulnerabilities to emotional distress contextualizes the relation between neuroticism and social anxiety as occurring indirectly through cognitive risk factors. In particular, inhibitory intolerance of uncertainty (IU; difficulty in uncertain circumstances), fear of negative evaluation (FNE; fear of being judged negatively), and anxiety sensitivity (AS) social concerns …

We examined five dimensions of distress tolerance (i.e. uncertainty, ambiguity, frustration, negative emotion, physical discomfort) as prospective predictors of perceived stress. Undergraduate students (N = 135) completed self-report questionnaires over the course of two assessment sessions (T1 and T2). Results of a linear regression in which the five dimensions of …