Text Message Treatment for Social Anxiety

Florida State University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Social Anxiety

Treatments: Behavioral: Safety Behavior Fading; Behavioral: Present Centered

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03562650

2017.22461

Details and patient eligibility

About

This is an intervention study designed to evaluate a text message based safety behavior fading treatment for people with social anxiety disorder.

Full description

This study hopes to assess whether a month long text message based safety behavior fading protocol is effective in reducing safety behaviors and social anxiety symptoms. Over the course of four consecutive weeks, text messages will be sent to participants the first day of the study and every other day for four weeks (14 texts in total). These text messages will remind participants to either avoid using their three most engaged in safety behaviors (assessed at pre-treatment) or to stay present-focused. The past week frequency of the participants' safety behaviors will be assessed at the beginning of pre-treatment, post-treatment, and four week follow up assessments Participants will be asked to complete an additional online questionnaire for both a post-treatment and a 4-week post-treatment follow up assessment. We hypothesize that: 1) the safety behavior group will show a greater overall reduction in social anxiety symptoms, 2) that the safety behavior group will show a reduction in the frequency of safety behavior use, and 3) that the present-focused group will show an increase in mindfulness.

Enrollment: 97 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 65 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Social Phobia Inventory score > 29

Exclusion criteria

• receiving therapy
• changes in the past 4 weeks with medication for emotional difficulties
• psychotic symptoms

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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97 participants in 2 patient groups

Safety Behavior Fading

Experimental group

Description:

Participants are asked to pick their three most common safety behaviors from a list and then receive texts every other day for a month reminding them to fade those behaviors.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Safety Behavior Fading

Present Centered

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants receive texts every other day for a month asking them to try to focus on the present that day.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Present Centered