Participants with Social Anxiety Disorder will be recruited from educational settings . After screening and informed consent, participants will be randomly assigned to PTC , ACG or CBT .The therapy session will be 8 session once a week, and data will be collected through psychological questionnaires in two phases at start and end of intervention.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
SINGLE
Enrollment
75
The two paired tasks Free Association Task (FAT) and Sentence Completion Task (SCT) form the core of the AI-integrated Proactive Thought Control (PTC) program. FAT shows a social-threat word and the participant types the first associated word, training proactive control at the lexical level; SCT then gives unfinished social-evaluative stems to complete with a benign word, extending the override to the propositional level. Both run three blocks of thirty self-paced trials per session (720 over two weeks), so every threat trial forces a positive, cue-relevant representation that overrides a primed negative associate before advancing. AI integration relies on real-time validation: SiEBERT scores sentiment and MiniLM embedding confirm semantic relevance, enforcing a positive, cue-relevant construal each trial. Feedback reinforces this accepted responses earn points, rejected one prompt revision, and the threshold relaxes after four failures and pass after eight.
8-session CBT protocol ( Hope, Heimberg \& Turk, 2019 manual) The CBT arm received an eight-session protocol moving from psychoeducation and the three-component model of social anxiety with an individualized Fear and Avoidance Hierarchy (Sessions 1-2), through cognitive restructuring using disputing questions from automatic thought to rational response (Sessions 3-4), to repeated graded exposure using role-plays, distress ratings, and added cognitive tools, with the final session offering core-belief work and setting post-treatment maintenance goals (Sessions 5-8)
Farah Shahzadi
Gujranwala, Punjab Province, Pakistan
Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self Report
Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self-Report; range 0-144; higher = worse (greater social anxiety severity)
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
Core Belief Questionnaire (CBQ)
Core Belief Questionnaire-Self-Trait and -Other (17 items each, 6-point Likert); range 17-102 if items are scored 1-6; higher = more strongly endorsed negative core beliefs (worse)".
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
Dot Probe task
milliseconds; more positive = stronger bias toward social threat
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
word sentence association paradigm
higher = more threat-relevant interpretation bias
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
Behavioral Avoidance Task
SUDS 0-100; higher = more subjective distress
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
beck depression inventory II
range 0-63; higher = worse
This platform is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional.
Participants did the same two tasks as the experimental group. The Free Association Task and the Sentence Completion Task , matched on stimuli, format, and time. The key difference was that the control removed the core training element: responses were not checked for meaning against the cue, and about half of the negative answers were accepted without correction, so the link between a threat cue and forcing a positive response was broken. In short, the control group did the same tasks and got the same exposure, but without the active thinking-training component.
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period