A 7-year study of twins found that behavioral inhibition in childhood is associated with social anxiety in adolescence. Behavioral inhibition was primarily assessed through shyness. Parental stress and a number of other factors were found to influence the strength of...
Many people flock to cities, but can urban areas actually be detrimental to mental health? A study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports suggests that traffic sounds may be related to increased depression, while birdsongs may be related to reduced anxiety.
Video feedback has been shown to help people with social anxiety disorder correct distorted self-perceptions. A recent study suggests that offering additional group feedback leads to further improvements, decreasing perceptions of anxiety and social concerns and increasing perceptions of performance.
Childhood trauma is well-known to have adverse effects on mental health into adulthood, but the nuances of these outcomes are not well understood. A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders explores how childhood trauma impacts specific aspects of...
A team of researchers explored treatment patterns among people diagnosed with anxiety or PTSD following a traumatic brain injury. The findings, published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, revealed that these individuals are more likely to be prescribed psychotropic...
New research indicates that anxious people tend to engage in higher levels of bedtime procrastination, which in turn explains why they tend to experience more sleep problems. The findings have been published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
An eight-year study examined the relationship between adolescent coping strategies and social anxiety. Findings suggest that a lack of adaptive coping strategies is related to the development of social anxiety. Those subjects who demonstrated maladaptive coping mechanisms when experiencing stress...
A recent study tested a new experimental procedure that may help researchers investigate treatments for social anxiety disorder. The study authors developed a social stress test that induces symptoms of social anxiety disorder and can be conducted entirely online. The...
Pavlovian threat conditioning (also known as fear conditioning) is a basic form of learning in which an animal or person comes to associate a particular stimulus with a negative outcome. New research, published in Behaviour Research and Therapy, indicates that...
LSD-assisted therapy could provide benefits to patients struggling with anxiety disorders, according to new research published in Biological Psychiatry. The findings suggest that the psychedelic drug can produce notable reductions of anxiety and comorbid depression symptoms.
High doses of Vitamin B6 might help to reduce anxiety, according to the results of a new double-blind placebo-controlled study published in Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental. The research provides preliminary evidence that B6 supplementation can produce behavioral outcomes by...
A new study has identified neuroplastic changes in brain structure that accompany attention bias modification training in highly anxious individuals. The findings, which appear in the journal Biological Psychology, shed light on the mechanisms underlying the efficacy of the treatment.
New research provides evidence that shyness is associated with reduced behavioral mimicry through increased self-focused attention during new social interactions. The findings have been published in the Journal of Research in Personality.
Socially anxious women exhibit heightened oxytocin reactivity to psychosocial stress, according to new research published in Psychoneuroendocrinology. The study provides evidence that the hormone plays a role in physiological reactions to socially stressful situations.
New findings suggest that people with social anxiety pay more attention to negative social information — but only if they have low attentional control. For participants with greater control over their attention, social anxiety vulnerability was not associated with an...