Social anxiety disorder (SAD)

  • Portrait of son hugging his father, together at home. Son caring for his father, putting hand on his shoulder, comforting and consoling him. Family love, bonding, care and confidence

    Social Fears in Children: The Roles of Parental Communication and Child Temperament

    A recent longitudinal study by Zeytinoglu and colleagues (2025) provides insights into how parental verbal communication and child characteristics contribute to the transmission of social fears. The study shows the impact of both positive and negative maternal statements about ambiguous social situations, finding that positive comments were linked to reductions in children’s social fear beliefs, while negative comments predicted increases, especially among children who were behaviourally inhibited or had high anxiety.

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  • anxious girl

    Advancing the Understanding and Treatment of Anxiety Disorders in Young People – Emanuel Miller International Conference 2025

    Bookings closed Anxiety disorders remain among the most common mental health challenges faced by children and adolescents, demanding ongoing innovation in both research and practice. Despite widespread recognition, critical gaps persist in understanding, diagnosing, and treating these conditions. This year’s eagerly anticipated Emanuel Miller International Conference brings together leading advancements in anxiety research and treatment, […]

    Event type
    Emanuel Miller
    Location
    LIVE STREAM
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  • Cover image

    January 2021 – The Bridge

    This issue of The Bridge features summaries of recent child and adolescent mental health research. I hope you enjoy reading about this excellent work which improves our understanding of a wide range of conditions and informs mental health care for young people.

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  • Do children with social anxiety disorder benefit from social skills training?

    Social anxiety disorder (SAD) in children can be difficult to treat, as evidenced by the varied outcomes reported post-treatment.1,2 Although childhood treatments for SAD commonly involve at least some social skills training,3 it isn’t clear whether children with SAD have particular difficulties with social skills. There is therefore a need to better establish whether social skills are an effective target for treating SAD.

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  • Paediatric anxiety disorders confer a considerable public health burden

    Anxiety disorders usually begin in childhood or adolescence and are the most common mental health condition across the life span.1,2 Consequently, intense research efforts are focused on delineating the underlying mechanisms of paediatric anxiety so that we can better identify those at risk and intervene early.

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  • Neuroscience Edition

    Welcome to this Neuroscience themed edition of The Bridge.
    The Royal College of Psychiatrists is currently promoting the neurosciences in its curriculum, for training Psychiatrists of the future. One of the many reasons for this is to develop more “Parity of Esteem” between physical and mental health conditions.

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  • Anxiety Edition – foreword by Dr Mark Lovell

    This edition of The Bridge covers the topic of anxiety. Owing to anxiety being common, with all of us experiencing a state of anxiety at some time and many also having trait anxiety, it is no surprise that ACAMH’s two main academic outputs the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Mental Health contain some good quality research on anxiety advancing our knowledge of the science and evidence based practice.

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  • Adult ABMT protocols need adapting for effective use in children

    Attention bias modification treatment (ABMT) aims to target attention biases in threat processing in patients with anxiety1. While ABMT seems to be effective in adults with social anxiety disorder (SAD),2,3 its effect in youths with SAD and the potential treatment moderators are unclear. In 2016, Lee Pergamin-Hight and colleagues conducted a randomised controlled trial to explore the efficacy of ABMT in youths and the influence of possible moderators of treatment outcomes.

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  • Children with a Specific Phobia do better in Individual CBT than Group CBT and guided parent-led CBT

    Children often present to health care settings with highly impairing and disabling anxiety disorders, including Specific Phobia, Social Anxiety Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Separation Anxiety Disorder.

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  • Negative interpretation bias in adolescents with subclinical social anxiety disorder

    Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a marked fear or anxiety of social situations where an individual may be exposed to possible scrutiny by others. Now, Yura Loscalzo and colleagues have examined the contribution of different components of interpretation bias — a model proposed to explain SAD whereby affected individuals systematically assign a threatening meaning to an objectively ambiguous stimulus with several possible interpretations.

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