Eva Gilboa-Schechtman

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Department of Psychology

Background The impact of exclusion (affiliation-loss) events is theorized to be painful and personally meaningful, especially in social anxiety. However, specific data on the impact of autobiographical exclusion events in social anxiety is scarce. To fill this gap, we conducted two studies. Methods Participants (Study 1: N = 246; Study 2: N = 273)...

Background Close relationships and especially romantic relationships are paramount to mental and physical health. Individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) experience difficulties in forming romantic relationships. Method We examined explicit and implicit partner preferences of individuals with (n = 52) and without SAD (n = 52) in a lab-based...

Objective: Affective flexibility, the capacity to respond to life’s varying environmental changes in a dynamic and adaptive manner, is considered a central aspect of psychological health in many psychotherapeutic approaches. The present study examined whether affective two-dimensional (i.e., arousal and valence) temporal variability extracted from...

Digital terror refers to the use of digital technology to disseminate graphic images of acts of violence to frighten the public. On October 7, 2023, militants of the Palestinian organization Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel and used digital terror to magnify their acts. Although the purposeful spreading of terror via digital means is not ne...

Background Threat and individual differences in threat-processing bias perception of stimuli in the environment. Yet, their effect on perception of one’s own (body-based) self-motion in space is unknown. Here, we tested the effects of threat on self-motion perception using a multisensory motion simulator with concurrent threatening or neutral audit...

Background Social anxiety (SA) is characterized by concerns about the expected occurrence (probability) and anticipated distress (cost) of social threats. Unclear is whether SA correlates specifically with biased expectations of belongingness or status threats. Aims We aimed to discern if SA is uniquely tied to biased expectancies of either belong...

Case conceptualization is central to the success of the therapeutic process. However, integrative case conceptualization research has lagged behind research on integrating therapeutic intervention techniques. A successful case conceptualization provides (a) a dynamic, context-sensitive, yet parsimonious model of the client’s functioning; (b) releva...

Social anxiety (SA) and depressive symptoms are frequently comorbid, with the onset of SA typically preceding the onset of depression. Individuals experiencing SA-depression comorbidity exhibit increased clinical and functional impairments as compared to individuals without this comorbidity. Understanding the mechanisms that underlie this comorbidi...

Flexibly updating behaviors towards others is crucial for adaptive social functioning. Previous studies have found that difficulties in flexibly updating behaviors are associated with social anxiety (SA). However, it is unclear whether such difficulties relate to actual social behaviors. The current study investigated the relationships between nega...

Depression is associated with increased maintenance of negative affect (NA) and reduced - blunted and short-lived - maintenance of positive affect (PA). Studies have focused on factors associated with the maintenance of NA, specifically, the emotion regulation strategy of brooding and the capacity to hold negative affective experiences in working m...

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a highly prevalent and disabling disorder characterized by intrapersonal (self-related) and interpersonal (interaction-related) difficulties. We use the biobehavioral systems of affiliation and status as linchpins connecting intrapersonal and interpersonal bodies of knowledge to frame such difficulties. We suggest t...

Social anxiety (SA) is associated with difficulties in positively updating negative social information when new information and feedback about chosen options (actual decisions) are received. However, it is unclear whether this difficulty persists when hidden information regarding unchosen options is explicitly presented. The aim of the current stud...

Objective Depression involves deficits in emotional flexibility. To date, the varied and dynamic nature of emotional processes during therapy has mostly been measured at discrete time intervals using clients’ subjective reports. Because emotions tend to fluctuate and change from moment to moment, the understanding of emotional processes in the trea...

Self-stigma is associated with a variety of negative self-perceptions among people coping with schizophrenia, as well as with different aspects of social behaviors. We explored the associations between self-compassion, self-esteem, social anxiety, and self-stigma among people coping with schizophrenia. The baseline data of 56 adults with schizophre...

Social anxiety (SA) is characterized by significant impairments in social functioning, yet the processes maintaining such impairments are understudied. Reduced nonverbal synchrony has been highlighted as a possible mechanism underlying these impairments. To understand the nature of synchrony in SA, individuals (N = 150) were invited to participate...

Background: Depression is a major cause of disability worldwide. Recent data suggest that, in industrialised countries, the prevalence of depression peaks in middle age. Identifying factors predictive of future depressive episodes is crucial for developing prevention strategies for this age group. Aims: We aimed to identify future depression in...

Objective: Client-therapist physiological synchrony has recently attracted significant empirical attention. Recent theoretical accounts propose that physiological linkages should not be considered a stable dyadic virtue but rather a dynamic process that depends on the situational context in which they transpire. The present study adopted a "moment...

Threat and individual differences in threat-processing bias perception of stimuli in the environment. Yet, their effect on perception of one’s own (body-based) self-motion in space is unknown. Here, we tested the effects of threat on self-motion perception using a multisensory motion simulator with concurrent threatening or neutral auditory stimuli...

In an ever-changing social world, learning and updating beliefs about others are essential for smooth interpersonal functioning. Social anxiety is a common and burdensome condition involving difficulties in interpersonal functioning. However, the processes governing the learning and updating of beliefs regarding others, processes crucial for these...

Objectives: The association between social anxiety (SA) and early-life status loss events (SLEs) is well documented. However, such an association in adulthood is yet to be examined. Methods: Two studies (N = 166 and N = 431) were conducted to address this question. Adult participants filled out questionnaires regarding SLEs accumulation during c...

Belongingness is a central biopsychosocial system. Challenges to belongingness (i.e. exclusion/ostracism) engender robust negative effects on affect and cognitions. Whether overinclusion – getting more than one’s fair share of social attention – favourably impacts affect and cognitions remains an open question. This pre-registered meta-analysis inc...

Social anxiety (SA) and depression are marked by enhanced avoidance motivations (apprehensions) and reduced approach motivations (aspirations). Integrating an approach/avoidance motivational model with the evolutionary-inspired motivational perspective, we examined the associations of SA and depression with apprehensions and aspirations in the doma...

Evolutionary models suggest that self-concept is a dynamic structure shaped jointly by interpersonal motivations and social challenges. Yet, empirical data assessing this claim are sparse. We examined this question in two studies. In study 1, participants (N = 386) generated spontaneous self-descriptions and filled out questionnaires assessing domi...

In an ever-changing social world, learning and updating beliefs about others are essential for smooth interpersonal functioning. Social anxiety is a common and burdensome condition involving difficulties in interpersonal functioning. However, the processes governing the learning and updating of beliefs regarding others, processes crucial for these...

Background - Social anxiety (SA) is a common and debilitating condition, negatively affecting life quality even at sub-diagnostic thresholds. We sought to characterize SA's acoustic signature using hypothesis-testing and machine learning (ML) approaches. Methods - Participants formed spontaneous utterances responding to instructions to refuse or co...

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a prevalent condition negatively affecting one’s sense of self and interpersonal functioning. Relying on cognitive but integrating interpersonal and evolutionary models of SAD as our theoretical base, we review basic processes contributing to the maintenance of this condition (e.g., self-focused attention, imagery,...

Social anxiety (SA) was associated with biases in the updating of self-related information. Whether and under which conditions such biases emerge with respect to other-related information remains under-explored. In a pre-registered study, online participants (n=590) were randomly assigned to one of two structurally identical reversal-learning tasks...

Evolutionary models suggest that social anxiety (SA) is associated with sensitivity to status loss. These models make several additional predictions concerning the strength as well as the specificity of the association between post-event distress (PED) following status losses and SA. First, the strength of this association is postulated to be enhan...

Background Negative self-views, especially in the domain of power (i.e. social-rank), characterize social anxiety (SA). Neuroimaging studies on self-evaluations in SA have mainly focused on subcortical threat processing systems. Yet, self-evaluation may concurrently invoke diverse affective processing, as motivational systems related to desired sel...

Women report greater post-traumatic distress (PTD) than men following physically threatening events. However, gender differences in PTD following social stressors such as status losses are understudied. Whereas the social construction account points to a general sensitivity in women following any type of stressor, the evolutionary account suggests...

Gonadal steroids (GSs) have been repeatedly shown to play a central role in the onset of postpartum depression (PPD). The underlying mechanisms, however, are only partially understood. We investigated the relationship between cognitive processing of emotional information and naturally occurring hormonal fluctuations in women with and without previo...

Depression affects millions worldwide, thus underscoring the urgent need to optimize health care practices. To better understand the processes involved in psychotherapy gains, studies have emphasized the need to complement subjective reports with objective measures, in particular biological markers. Oxytocin (OT) has been proposed as a potential bi...

Objective: The current meta-analysis investigates the efficacy of psychotherapy during psychiatric hospitalization and examines the moderating role of diagnosis and therapeutic approach. Methods: We conducted systematic searches in literature databases, including PubMed, PsycInfo, and Google Scholar. In total, 37 samples were included for the me...

Individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) typically have elevated depressive symptoms and approximately 50% also meet criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD; Beesdo et al., 2007). In the present study, we examined the relationship between social anxiety and depressive symptoms during cognitive-behavior group treatment (CBGT) for SAD. Spec...

Research has identified three different types of smiles – the reward, affiliation and dominance smile – which serve expressions of happiness, connectedness, and superiority, respectively. Examining their explicit and implicit evaluations by considering a perceivers’ level of social anxiety and psychopathy may enhance our understanding of these smil...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00042-0

Computerized natural language processing techniques can analyze psychotherapy sessions as texts, thus generating information about the therapy process and outcome and supporting the scaling-up of psychotherapy research. We used topic modeling to identify topics discussed in psychotherapy sessions and explored (a) which topics best identified client...

Objective: The present study implements an automatic method of assessing arousal in vocal data as well as dynamic system models to explore intrapersonal and interpersonal affect dynamics within psychotherapy and to determine whether these dynamics are associated with treatment outcomes. Method: The data of 21,133 mean vocal arousal observations...

Objective: The present study implements an automatic method of assessing arousal in vocal data as well as dynamic system models to explore intrapersonal and interpersonal affect dynamics within psychotherapy and to determine whether these dynamics are associated with treatment outcomes. Method: The data of 21,133 mean vocal arousal observations wer...

Smiles are nonverbal signals that convey social information and influence the social behavior of recipients, but the precise form and social function of a smile can be variable. In previous work, we have proposed that there are at least three physically distinct types of smiles associated with specific social functions: reward smiles signal positiv...

Previous research examining the relationship between social anxiety (SA) and approach and avoidance motivations has been rather limited, and the results – contradictory. We sought to investigate the motivational profiles in SA while differentiating between approach and avoidance motivations in the social-rank and affiliation domains. Based on cogni...

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

Raw linguistic data within psychotherapy sessions may provide important information about clients' progress and well-being. In the current study, computerized text analytic techniques were applied to examine whether linguistic features were associated with clients' experiences of distress within and between clients and whether changes in linguistic...

Raw linguistic data within psychotherapy sessions may provide important information about clients’ progress and well-being. In the current study, computerized text analytic techniques were applied to examine whether linguistic features were associated with clients’ experiences of distress within and between clients and whether changes in linguistic...

Background Ruminative responding involves repetitive and passive thinking about one’s negative affect. This tendency interferes with initiation of goal-directed rewarding strategies, which could alleviate depressive states. Such reward-directed response selection has been shown to be mediated by ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens (VS/NAcc) function...

The present work advances the science of the smile by investigating how perceivers mentally represent this heterogenous expression. Across both perception- and production-based tasks, we report evidence that perceivers mentally represent reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles as distinct categories associated with specific behaviors, social cont...

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a highly prevalent and debilitating condition. Although effective treatments exist, their success is limited. This narrative review seeks to advance a comprehensive understanding of the types of social threat affecting individuals with SAD from the perspective of two basic biobehavioral systems: affiliation and soci...

Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

Background and objectives: Negative interpretation biases are postulated to play etiological and maintaining roles in social anxiety (SA). However, empirical support for interpretation biases of facial expression in SA is inconsistent. Given the importance of signals of (dis)approval in SA, our objective was to examine whether SA is associated wit...

Previous studies have found that PTSD is associated with hippocampal related impairment in cognitive flexibility. However, little is known about this impairment following nature adventure interventions. The current ex post facto study aimed to examine the relationship between cognitive flexibility, sailing-based intervention and PTSD symptoms. 39 i...

Sexual trauma is associated with particularly harmful consequences in comparison to other types of trauma. Studies investigating differences between trauma-types usually focus on the most distressing (i.e., main) trauma of each participant and do not consider the cumulative effects of multiple traumas which many individuals experience. We sought to...

Background and objectives: Evolutionary theories propose that socially anxious individuals are especially sensitive to social-rank signals, presumably at the expense of the attunement to signals of affiliation. Despite this theoretical claim, few empirical attempts examined the association between social anxiety (SA) and sensitivity to specific fe...

Models of social anxiety (SA) place the self as an organizing and causal center involved in the maintenance of this condition. An integrative conceptual framework for the understanding of the self is used to review the literature on the self in SA. Two main distinctions are emphasized: the self‐as‐a‐subject (I‐self) versus self‐as‐an‐object (Me‐sel...

Objective: Sudden gains are robust predictors of outcome in psychotherapy. However, previous attempts at predicting sudden gains have yielded inconclusive findings. The aim of the present study was to examine a novel, transdiagnostic, transtherapeutic predictor of sudden gains that would replicate in different settings and populations. Specificall...

The present study investigated the associations between social anxiety (SA) and depression on the one hand, and intra- and interpersonal perceptions within a friendship relationship on the other. Evolutionary theories suggest that SA is associated with impairment in the social-rank system. Recent studies suggest that depression is associated with i...

Congruence between therapists’ and their clients’ alliance ratings was found to be beneficial to therapeutic processes and outcomes. To date, however, less is known about the possible moderators of such congruence. The current study adapted Funder’s (1995) realistic accuracy model to identify a judge characteristic (therapists’ affiliative tendenci...

Objective: Traumatic events tend to play a major role in the way we perceive ourselves. Whereas the links between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and self-perceptions are well examined, less is known regarding other factors that may be involved in the erosion of self-perceptions. We sought to examine the contribution of trauma-centrality and...

When people are being evaluated, their whole body responds. Verbal feedback causes robust activation in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. What about nonverbal evaluative feedback? Recent discoveries about the social functions of facial expression have documented three morphologically distinct smiles, which serve the functions of reinfo...

Cognitive models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) emphasize the role of explicit and implicit self-evaluations (SEs) in the etiology and maintenance of this condition. Whereas individuals with SAD consistently report lower explicit SEs as compared with nonanxious individuals, findings concerning implicit SEs are mixed. To gain a more nuanced unders...

Evolutionary models highlight the centrality of the social-rank system in social anxiety (SA). Cognitive models emphasize the role of low self-evaluations (SEs) in the etiology and maintenance of SA. Based on these models, we predicted that explicit and implicit social-rank SEs are negatively associated with SA-severity. Consistent with previous fi...

Social-rank cues communicate social status or social power within and between groups. Information about social-rank is fluently processed in both visual and auditory modalities. So far, the investigation on the processing of social-rank cues has been limited to studies in which information from a single modality was assessed or manipulated. Yet, in...

Background and Objectives: Social exclusion is ubiquitous and painful. Evolutionary models indicate sex differences in coping with social stress. Recent empirical data suggests different sex patterns in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) reactivity. The present study sought to test this hypothesis. Design:...

The majority of evidence on social anxiety (SA)-linked attentional biases to threat comes from research using facial expressions. Emotions are, however, communicated through other channels, such as voice. Despite its importance in the interpretation of social cues, emotional prosody processing in SA has been barely explored. This study investigated...

Objective: The unique characteristics of sexual assault (SA)-a toxic mix of an interpersonal harm, a violent exploitation of one's body, and a transformation of an act of connectedness into an act of submission-are postulated to negatively affect the self-concept. We sought to deepen the understanding of self-concept impairments among sexually ass...

Maternal postpartum depression (PPD) exerts long-term negative effects on infants; yet the mechanisms by which PPD disrupts emotional development are not fully clear. Utilizing an extreme-case design, 971 women reported symptoms of depression and anxiety following childbirth and 215 high and low on depressive symptomatology reported again at 6 mont...

The objective of this study was to examine the influence of environmental challenges on tic expression by subjective and objective measures. The study group consisted of 41 children aged 6-18 years (M=10.15, SD=2.73) with a primary diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. Subjective measures included the Functional Assessment Interview developed for this st...

This chapter describes a treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using prolonged exposure (PE) therapy adapted for pediatric populations and presents some of the studies that show its efficacy within this population. The chapter provides a description of the adaptations made for children and adolescents who deal with symptoms of post-tra...

Negative perceptions of self and others have lately become one of the criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among adults and adolescents. Drawing from theories of mental representations in psychopathology, this study examined self-reported negative cognitions, self and parental representations, and relationship themes among adolescents...

Comments on the article by S. Ziv-Beiman (see record 2015-39481-001 ), which discusses the dilemmas around the treatment of Dana, a patient with resistant trichotillomania. To the author's mind, integrative treatment is built on three main propositions. The first is of goal setting: clearly defining the goals which are tightly related to the case f...

This chapter describes a treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using prolonged exposure (PE) therapy adapted for pediatric populations and presents some of the studies that show its efficacy within this population. The chapter provides a description of the adaptations made for children and adolescents who deal with symptoms of posttraum...

Abstract A small number of facial expressions may be universal in that they are produced by the same basic affective states and recognized as such throughout the world. However, other aspects of emotionally expressive behavior vary widely across culture. Just why do they vary? We propose that some cultural differences in expressive behavior are de...

Traumatic events, including sexual abuse, experiencing or witnessing violence, and natural disasters, are common among adolescents, and this online therapist guide presents a proven treatment for PTSD that has been adapted for the adolescent population. It applies the principles of Prolonged Exposure (PE) to help adolescents emotionally process the...

Two evolutionarily designed systems govern the way we navigate the vagaries of the social world: the affiliation biobehavioral system and the social rank biobehavioral system. We suggest that social anxiety is characterized by (1) a thin-skinned disposition to matters of social rank; (2) a propensity to respond to social rank changes by lowering on...

The current study is the first to use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine how individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) process emotional facial expressions (EFEs). We expected that, compared to healthy controls (HCs), participants with SAD will show an early (<200 ms post-stimulus) over-activation in the insula and the fusiform gyrus (FG,...

According to Rapee (1997), maternal social anxiety (SA) is directly associated with adolescent SA because maternal SA causes overprotective and controlling parental behavior. A total of 127 adolescents who were in the process of transitioning to a boarding school for at-risk youth as well as their mothers participated in the current study, 30% of t...

Purpose To characterize the perceptions of self, mother and family of prepubertal children and to determine if the perceptions of children with depression and their behavior towards their mothers are different from children with anxiety disorders and nonpsychiatric controls. Methods Children (aged 7–13 years) with major depressive disorder (n = 30...