Safety behavior modification intervention improves social anxiety symptoms

Key takeaways:

• An intervention for modifying safety behaviors improved social anxiety in people with trauma.
• Future research should evaluate the intervention in a clinical sample with long-term follow-up.

WASHINGTON — In trauma-exposed people with social anxiety, a safety behavior modification intervention more effectively improved anxiety symptoms compared with a modifiable behavior intervention, according to a poster presented here.

“This study is a sub-analysis of one of our graduate student’s master’s projects,” Kenna Ebert, BA, a research assistant in the Anxiety and Behavioral Health Clinic at Florida State University in Tallahassee, told Healio. “She utilized a safety behavior elimination intervention that she created and evaluated the effects on PTSD. However, there is a big overlap between PTSD and social anxiety in that they both have safety behavior utilization, so I wanted to see if this intervention affected social anxiety.”

Ebert presented the poster at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America Conference.

The computer-based safety behavior elimination intervention (SBETS), which “is based on the [cognitive behavioral therapy] framework and starts with psychoeducation about trauma and safety behaviors and why people use them,” Ebert told Healio. “Then, it talks about why it can be harmful to use them and how it might maintain their symptoms. Then, it has [participants] select two behaviors to reduce or eliminate for a month.”

A total of 71 participants (mean age, 20.96 years) were randomly assigned to SBETS or a modifiable behavior intervention (MoBI) control, which involved education on different behaviors.

The researchers used questionnaires to evaluate trauma exposure and load, and social anxiety symptoms.

Most participants were female (88.7%) and Caucasian (85.9%). At baseline, there were significant differences in psychotropic medication use and trauma load between the SBETS and MoBI groups, but no differences in social anxiety symptoms.

The SBETS group experienced significant reductions in social anxiety symptoms at the 1-month follow-up (P < .001), while the MoBI group did not.

Further adjusted analyses revealed that treatment condition was a predictor of social anxiety symptoms at follow-up (P < .001).

“We weren’t recruiting for social anxiety symptoms, so this was a bonus that we had some people with elevated social anxiety,” so the next steps should include a sample recruited for their social anxiety symptoms, Ebert told Healio. Future research should also include long-term follow-up, she said.