Application of emotion-focused therapy on social anxiety disorders / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Social anxiety disorder is a common anxiety disorder in which a key feature is interpersonal avoidance accompanied by generalized problems with emotion identification and emotion regulation. In response to the gap in these therapeutic priorities in other therapies, emotion-focused therapy has emerged to fill the part of the treatment of emotions with an emphasis on the relational process. The paper reviews the recent studies related with the treatment of social anxiety disorder with emotion-focused therapy. The results suggest that the main points of social anxiety onset in an emotion-focused perspective are traumatic emotional experiences and self-criticism, and that the therapeutic focus of emotion-focused therapy is on dealing with the traumatic emotional scenario behind the anxiety and exposing it to adaptive emotions to be transformed. It also works better in combination with other more mainstream therapies. This suggests that emotion-focused therapy is a promising approach for the clinical treatment of social anxiety disorder and looks forward to the development of a more integrated treatment approach in the clinic.