Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)
Conditions
Brief summary
Participants with Social Anxiety Disorder will be recruited from educational settings . After screening and informed consent, participants will be randomly assigned to PTC , ACG or CBT .The therapy session will be 8 session once a week, and data will be collected through psychological questionnaires in two phases at start and end of intervention.
Interventions
OTHERAI-Proactive thought control
The two paired tasks Free Association Task (FAT) and Sentence Completion Task (SCT) form the core of the AI-integrated Proactive Thought Control (PTC) program. FAT shows a social-threat word and the participant types the first associated word, training proactive control at the lexical level; SCT then gives unfinished social-evaluative stems to complete with a benign word, extending the override to the propositional level. Both run three blocks of thirty self-paced trials per session (720 over two weeks), so every threat trial forces a positive, cue-relevant representation that overrides a primed negative associate before advancing. AI integration relies on real-time validation: SiEBERT scores sentiment and MiniLM embedding confirm semantic relevance, enforcing a positive, cue-relevant construal each trial. Feedback reinforces this accepted responses earn points, rejected one prompt revision, and the threshold relaxes after four failures and pass after eight.
OTHERCognitive Behavior Therapy
8-session CBT protocol ( Hope, Heimberg \& Turk, 2019 manual) The CBT arm received an eight-session protocol moving from psychoeducation and the three-component model of social anxiety with an individualized Fear and Avoidance Hierarchy (Sessions 1-2), through cognitive restructuring using disputing questions from automatic thought to rational response (Sessions 3-4), to repeated graded exposure using role-plays, distress ratings, and added cognitive tools, with the final session offering core-belief work and setting post-treatment maintenance goals (Sessions 5-8)
OTHERActive Control
Participants did the same two tasks as the experimental group. The Free Association Task and the Sentence Completion Task , matched on stimuli, format, and time. The key difference was that the control removed the core training element: responses were not checked for meaning against the cue, and about half of the negative answers were accepted without correction, so the link between a threat cue and forcing a positive response was broken. In short, the control group did the same tasks and got the same exposure, but without the active thinking-training component.
Sponsors
Farah Shahzadi
Study design
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
SINGLE (Subject)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
18 Years to 26 Years
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
* Were between 18 and 26 years of age, corresponding to the developmental period of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000). * Met DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for Social Anxiety Disorder on the SCID-5-RV (First et al., 2015). * Scored at or above the clinical cutoff of 30 on the LSAS-SR, indicating clinically significant social anxiety (Mennin et al., 2002). * Were not receiving any other form of psychological intervention at the time of the study. * Had sufficient English proficiency to understand instructions and complete the assessments (Flores, 2006). * Provided written informed consent. * Possessed basic computer literacy and typing skills required for the digital tasks.
Exclusion criteria
* Were younger than 18 or older than 26 years. * Did not meet DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for Social Anxiety Disorder on the SCID-5-RV. * Scored in the clinically significant range for general anxiety (BAI ≥ 16; Beck et al., 1988) or at or above the threshold for moderate depression (BDI-II ≥ 20; Beck et al., 1996). * Were currently receiving psychological treatment for any psychiatric condition. * Had a lifetime history of a severe psychiatric disorder other than Social Anxiety Disorder (e.g., psychosis, bipolar disorder). * Had a medical or neurological condition that could interfere with task completion or valid responding. * Were unable to complete the study procedures or assessments. * Had no prior experience using a computer.
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self Report | Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period | Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self-Report; range 0-144; higher = worse (greater social anxiety severity) |
| Core Belief Questionnaire (CBQ) | Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period | Core Belief Questionnaire-Self-Trait and -Other (17 items each, 6-point Likert); range 17-102 if items are scored 1-6; higher = more strongly endorsed negative core beliefs (worse)". |
| Dot Probe task | Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period | milliseconds; more positive = stronger bias toward social threat |
| word sentence association paradigm | Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period | higher = more threat-relevant interpretation bias |
| Behavioral Avoidance Task | Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period | SUDS 0-100; higher = more subjective distress |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| beck depression inventory II | Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period | range 0-63; higher = worse |
Countries
Pakistan
Outcome results
None listed