Data from the National Comorbidity Study revealed the lifetime prevalence of social phobia to be 13% and the 6-monthprevalence to be 8%. These figures indicate that social phobia is the most common anxiety disorder and one of themost common emotional disorders in the general population (second only to sustance abuse). Social phobia has anearly onset and appears to follow a chronic and unremitting course. Social phobics suffer severe emotional distress,social avoidance, increased use of alcohol and other drugs, increased suicidal ideation and attempts, incompleteeducational attainment, and social, educational and occupational maladjustment (including lost productivity). Aprominent gap in understanding the psychopathology of social phobia is whether the disorder is characterized bydeficits in social skills. Extant data have provided mixed findings, but the weight of the clinical evidence is that socialphobics are deficient in social skills but the exact skill deficits remain to be elucidated. Whether or not social phobicsare deficient in social skill has implications for how psychosocial treatment is carried out.Conceptually, there are two studies proposed in this application. The first study is designed to determine if socialphobics manifest social skills deficits, explicate the nature of the deficiencies, and determine if the generalized are moredeficient than the non-generalized (specific subtype). A normal comparison group will be included in order to allow for acomparison of social skills in social phobics to those of normals. Also, including the normal group will allow for thegeneration of norms to which the social skills of social phobics in future studies can be compared. The second study isdesigned to determine if skill deficits in generalized social phobics can be improved, and whether improvements insocial skills are associated with improvements in overall social functioning.
