11/19/2024 Corinne Carlton-Smith: Reward-Related Dysfunction in Social Anxiety Disorder: Implications for Current Treatment and Future Directions
Clinical Brown Bag
Corinne Carlton-Smith, PhD
F32 Postdoctoral Fellow
Psychology and Human Development
Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Time: 12:00PM-1:00PM
Location: 316 Wilson Hall
Reward-Related Dysfunction in Social Anxiety Disorder: Implications for Current Treatment and Future Directions
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a chronic and impairing disorder characterized by persistent fear and avoidance of social situations. SAD ranks among the most prevalent anxiety disorders and tends to onset during adolescence. Despite the prevalence of this debilitating disorder, treatment outcomes for individuals with SAD remain among the poorest of the affective disorders. While current gold-standard therapeutic approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) target some mechanisms that contribute to the maintenance of SAD (e.g., fear-related avoidance) only about 50% of individuals remit following treatment and a large proportion of individuals experience persistent symptoms and even relapse within the first year following treatment. This gap in efficacy suggests that other key mechanisms that contribute to maintaining SAD may not be actively targeted in current interventions such as CBT. One such mechanism that is not directly targeted in CBT is social anhedonia, which reduces opportunities for engagement in rewarding approach-related behaviors. For example, while exposure therapy does a fantastic job at reducing avoidance of feared social situations it does not, specifically, enhance reward-related approach of social situations that are dampened in SAD. In this talk, I will present recent self-report, clinical, and neural evidence pointing to positive valence system deficits unique to SAD in both adult and adolescent samples. Further, I will discuss current treatment approaches that focus on positive valence system engagement and show potential to enhance the efficacy of current interventions for SAD.
Questions? Contact David Schlundt.