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Inflated sense of responsibility, explanatory style and the cognitive model of social anxiety disorder: a brief report of a case control study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2019

Matthew Jones  and
Sarah Rakovshik
Matthew Jones*
Affiliation:
Institute of Life Sciences 2, Swansea University School of Medicine, Swansea, UK
Sarah Rakovshik
Affiliation:
Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre and Oxford University, Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

We sought to investigate situation-specific inflated sense of responsibility and explanatory style in social anxiety disorder (SAD) according to the cognitive model. Participants aged 17–68 years (mean = 31.9, SD = 11.1) included waiting list patients referred to a primary care mental health service for cognitive behavioural therapy for SAD (n = 18) and non-anxious control participants (n = 65). A battery of psychometric measures, including a bespoke measure of responsibility beliefs, was used. Compared with controls, participants with SAD were more likely to demonstrate an inflated sense of responsibility (p ≤ 0.001), and to adopt a negative explanatory style specific to social interaction (p ≤ 0.01). Inflated sense of responsibility was found to correlate with SAD symptomatology (r = 0.47, p ≤ 0.05), and with increased usage of safety behaviours (r = 0.47, p ≤ 0.05). Caseness (β = 1.45, p ≤ 0.01) and stability of causal attribution (β = 0.25, p ≤ 0.001) were found to predict inflated responsibility in our sample. To our knowledge this study represents the first attempt to investigate inflated responsibility within the context of SAD. Our results support the notion of inflated responsibility as a feature of SAD.

Key learning aims

  1. (1) To understand the cognitive behavioural components of Clark and Wells’ model of SAD, and their bi-directional nature.

  2. (2) To understand what the term ‘inflated sense of responsibility’ refers to, and how it relates to CBT.

  3. (3) To understand what the term ‘explanatory style’ refers to, and how this concept can also relate to CBT.

Keywords

causal attributionsCBTresponsibilitysocial anxiety disorder
Type
Original Research
Information
the Cognitive Behaviour Therapist , Volume 12: Special Issue: Cultural Adaptations of CBT , 2019 , e19
Copyright
© British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies 2019 

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References

Further reading

Clark, DM, Wells, A (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In Heimberg, RG, Liebowitz, MR, Hope, DA and Schneier, FR (eds), Social Phobia: Diagnosis, Assessment, and Treatment (pp. 69–93). New York, NY, USA: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Salkovskis, P, Wroe, A, Gledhill, A, Morrison, N, Forrester, E, Richards, C, Thorpe, S (2000). Responsibility attitudes and interpretations are characteristic of obsessive compulsive disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy 38, 347–372. doi: 10.1016/s0005-7967(99)00071-6 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weiner, B (1986). An Attributional Theory of motivation and emotion, pp. 159–190. New York, NY, USA: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4612-4948-1_6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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