Research in to feelings of responsibility in social anxiety
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Inflated perception of responsibility in social anxiety disorder.
IRAS ID
157569
Contact name
Matthew Jones
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Oxford University
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 5 months, 2 days
Research summary
The research project in question is looking at feelings of responsibility in social anxiety. In some anxiety problems, people can be prone to assuming too much responsibility for things which go wrong. In this way they can be thought to have an ‘inflated sense of responsibility’. If this is the case for some people with social anxiety then knowing about it would be useful to help mental health professionals understand the problem better. It might also mean that actually changing how people think about responsibility when they are feeling socially anxious could help us treat social anxiety in the future. Participants for the control group for the study will be expected to complete a short screening measure for anxiety and depression and a further two questionnaires to assess beliefs concerning responsibility for perceived poor outcomes during social interaction. This will establish a baseline mean score for the primary outcome measure. The participants for the clinical experimental groups will be expected to complete the same questionnaires without the screening measure, plus 4 additional questionnaires. The questionnaires will be completed online in one single sitting which for the experimental group may take between 30-45 minutes but only around 15 minutes for the controls. These will provide data for the secondary outcome measures and allow for regression analysis to explore the relationship between the primary outcome measure and the various other processes which are known to maintain social anxiety disorder. The research will be self funded. Recruitment will take place using nationally used social media, classified advertisement websites for the control group and for the experimental group participants will be recruited from the IAPT Cambridgeshire waiting lists. The IAPT service has 4 sites, but the researcher will be based at 1 of these only.
REC name
Wales REC 7
REC reference
15/WA/0117
Date of REC Opinion
2 Apr 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion