The East Bay Anxiety Lab is committed to furthering knowledge of the development, nature, and treatment of anxiety and related disorders. A particular focus of our work is social anxiety disorder (SAD), which is the fourth most common mental health disorder. Despite a lifetime prevalence rate of nearly 13%, there remains a significant lack of understanding of SAD. Although individuals with SAD may be aware that something is wrong, they (and often loved ones, health professionals, and society at large) frequently mistake the signs of SAD as simply “shyness.” For these and other reasons, most individuals with SAD do not seek treatment until they have been suffering for over two decades. Therefore, one of our primary research aims is to translate basic research on attentional processing and emotion regulation in SAD to easily-disseminated treatments.

 

Our current research falls into four domains.

 

Attention biases and attentional control:

Attention plays an important role in the maintenance of anxiety – if we tend to pay attention to threatening information over neutral information, such as a face expressing disgust over a different face with a neutral expression, we may be prone to experiencing more social anxiety. However, we know little about how such biases in attention contribute to the development of social anxiety symptoms over time. Therefore, we are interested in understanding how attentional processing contributes to the maladaptive regulation of anxiety. Currently, we are using self-report, behavioral, and eye-tracking data to examine whether attention biases to threat or poor attentional control (the ability to re-direct attention) contribute to the development of social anxiety symptoms in individuals at risk for SAD.

 

Emotion regulation:

People who experience problematic anxiety may also have trouble with other emotions, which, in turn, may contribute to the worsening of the anxiety. We are interested in characterizing the processes that subserve maladaptive regulation of the broader array of emotions in anxious individuals. For example, why do individuals with SAD have fewer and less intense positive emotions than non-anxious individuals? We are currently studying whether social anxiety and depression affect the ability to use empathy to share in the negative and positive emotions of others.

 

Mechanisms of treatment: 

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most empirically-supported treatment for SAD to date, with nearly 70% of treatment-completers reaching remission. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of individuals drop-out from treatment early or fail to respond to treatment. There is also some evidence that, despite improvement, post-treatment positive psychological functioning (e.g., quality of life) in individuals with SAD fails to reach the normal range. As such, one area of our research is aimed at understanding why and for whom SAD treatments work (or do not work). In collaboration with James Gross (Stanford), Philippe Goldin (UC Davis), and Rick Heimberg (Temple University), we are examining the relative efficacy of and mechanisms underlying CBT compared to mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) for SAD.

 

Mental health literacy: 

Mental health problems will affect everyone at some point during their life, either through having a disorder oneself or through having close contact with someone who does. Therefore, it is important that members of the public have some knowledge about how to recognize, prevent, and seek treatment for mental health problems. Such knowledge may also help to reduce the stigma attached to mental health problems in this country. In this effort, we are currently collaborating with James Gross and Amit Etkin (Stanford) to study how people perceive various treatments for depression. We are also examining how negatively biased beliefs about certain treatments may be corrected.