A Randomized Controlled Trial of Compassion Focused Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder

Background: One of the most common anxiety disorders is the social anxiety disorder (SAD), which is characterized by intolerable anxiety and self-consciousness in daily social situations. A large body of study is conducted on the treatment of this disorder, though further studies are required on new psychological therapies. Objectives: The present study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of compassion focused therapy (CFT) on patients with SAD. Methods: The present randomized controlled trial study, which is along with pre-test, post-test, and follow-up with control group, 34 subjects who based on the structured clinical interview for DSM (SCID) had the criteria for social anxiety disorder on the basis of DSM-IV-TR, and had no other severe psychiatric disorders, were assigned completely randomly and equally into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was treated with 12 one-weekly CFT sessions, whereas the control group did not receive any treatment. At the beginning of the research, after 12 weeks and after a follow-up period of 8 weeks, all subjects were evaluated with acceptance and action questionnaire (AAQ-II), mindful attention awareness scale (MAAS), levels of self-criticism scale (LOSC), self-compassion scale (SCS), World Health Organization quality of life-BREF (WHOQOL-BREF), and Liebowitz social anxiety scale (LSAS) instruments. In addition to descriptive statistics, repeated measure analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) was used in order to analyze the findings and using SPSS-21 software all analyzes were conducted. Results: Based on the RM-ANOVA, CFT was significantly more effective than non-treatment in reducing psychological inflexibility, self-criticism, and severity of social anxiety symptoms (P < 0.001) in both post-test and two months’ follow-up. Moreover, CFT was able to significantly increase the mindfulness levels, self-compassion, and quality of life in patients with social anxiety (P < 0.01). Conclusions: Compassion-focused interventions apparently play a quite effective role in reducing symptoms and increasing the quality of life of patients with social anxiety disorder.