Perception of threat in children with social phobia: comparison to nonsocially anxious children before and after treatment

The present study investigated interpretation bias and reduced evidence for danger (RED) bias in 49 children with social phobia and 49 nonsocially anxious children between the ages of 8 and 14 years, using an ambiguous stories task. A posttreatment and follow-up measure was included for 26 of the socially phobic children to examine whether there would be a change in interpretation and RED bias after a 12-week behavior therapy program. Ambiguous scenarios were presented sentence by sentence. Participants gave interpretations and fear ratings after each sentence, and they rated negative emotions after each complete scenario. Compared to the nonsocially anxious children, children with social phobia displayed both a RED bias and an interpretation bias. After the treatment program, the children with social phobia displayed a reduced tendency to make biased interpretations, but there were no significant posttreatment changes in the RED bias. At 1 year follow-up there was a significant reduction in both interpretation and RED bias and clinical children no longer differed from nonsocially anxious controls.