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), selfcompassion 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.