Junwen Chen

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Verified

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• PhD
• Associate Professor at Australian National University

Transdiagnostic interventions present pragmatic benefits in treatment dissemination and training of mental health professionals when faced with emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. Excessive worry is a common feature across emotional disorders and represents an ideal candidate target for transdiagnostic intervention. The current pilo...

Background Childhood anxiety and depression lead to great distress and impairment. Preventing them simultaneously in early life is critically important. We evaluated the long-term efficacy of an emotion regulation-based (ER) and a behavioural activation-based (BA) program. Both aimed to build resilience to prevent worry, a transdiagnostic feature a...

Intolerance of uncertainty, a transdiagnostic factor manifested across emotional disorders, has been associated with difficulties in regulating emotions. This meta-analysis addresses the lack of synthesis of this relationship. PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, and ProQuest were systematically searched for relevant articles published up to and during Novemb...

This meta-analysis examined the relationships between dimensions of perfectionism and social anxiety. A literature search using the databases PsychINFO, Medline, and Embase yielded 40 studies. Our findings showed large to very-large-sized associations between social anxiety and dimensions of perfectionism related to perfectionistic concerns, namely...

Growing with Gratitude (GWG) is a universal prevention program based on positive psychology that aims to prevent anxiety and depression in primary-school-aged children. The mental health of children is a key concern for schools as it has an extensive impact in all areas of life. A cluster randomised controlled trial was implemented in nine primary...

Objectives Current best‐practice treatments for social anxiety disorder do not directly address loneliness, despite its role in the maintenance of the condition. The current study targets this issue directly, using mixed methods to provide an initial test of the efficacy of an established loneliness intervention, groups 4 health (G4H), among 33 peo...

This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to identify sociocultural factors studied in relation to social anxiety in Asians residing in Western societies and synthesize findings on their relationships with social anxiety. A systematic search was conducted in PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest. The last search was performed...

The bivalent fear of evaluation model proposes that fear of negative evaluation (FNE) and fear of positive evaluation (FPE) are distinct but related constructs, and that social anxiety arises when they are elevated. This represents a variable-centered perspective. However, a recent review suggested that individuals may be affected by unique combina...

Purpose: Adults who stutter are at risk of developing high levels of social anxiety, leading to negative outcomes and contributing towards stuttering relapse post treatment. To ensure that psychological treatments for social anxiety in stuttering adults are relevant and effective, a broader empirical understanding of the mechanisms of social anxiet...

Background and Objectives Transdiagnostic approaches have been promoted as a means of maximising preventative effects across multiple problems with depression and anxiety suitable targets as they appear to have highly interconnected systems in pathology development and maintenance. This study investigated long-term effects of two universal school-b...

School refusal behaviours in adolescents have deleterious immediate and long-term consequences and are associated with mental ill-health such as anxiety and depression. Understanding factors that place youth at higher risk of school refusal behaviour may assist in developing effective management approaches. We investigated parental and adolescent f...

The study of narcissism has been hindered by conceptual, theoretical, and measurement in-consistencies. In this article, we report two studies that tested a novel unified conceptualization and theoretical approach to narcissism using the Unified Narcissism Scale–Revised. Study 1 revised the recently developed Unified Narcissism Scale to construct a...

The mechanisms by which delusion and anxiety affect the tendency to make hasty decisions (Jumping-to-Conclusions bias) remain unclear. This paper proposes a Bayesian computational model that explores the assignment of evidence weights as a potential explanation of the Jumping-to-Conclusions bias using the Beads Task. We also investigate the Beads T...

Mental illness in adolescents is on the rise, thus it is vital to study factors that can improve youth mental health. The extant theory and research have identified both social (school climate; school identification) and individual (resilience) constructs as protectors of mental health. However, these protective factors remain in silo and require f...

For people with social anxiety, ongoing exposure to feared situations is crucial for both treatment and the prevention of relapse. The COVID‐19 pandemic—with prolonged, often enforced, reductions in people's social contact—reduced such exposure and may thus have exacerbated social anxiety symptoms. In this three‐wave longitudinal study (N = 212) we...

The PERMA (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationship, Meaning, Achievement) model can be used to describe the factors that contribute to wellbeing. As many children face mental health challenges worldwide, strategies to increase wellbeing and resilience have become increasingly desirable. The aim of this scoping review was to establish what is kno...

Background Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common mental health problem, and its core cognitive manifestation is the persistent fear of being evaluated, including both negatively (FNE) and positively (FPE). This study aimed to examine the longitudinal relationships of FNE, FPE and SAD and explore their neural basis. Methods Three samples were r...

To date, little is known about the role of social anxiety in the assignment of evidence weights which could contribute to the jumping-to-conclusion bias. The present study used a Bayesian computational method to understand the mechanism of jumping-to-conclusion bias in social anxiety, specifically through the assignment of weights to information sa...

Existing evidence suggests that suicide stigma and suicide literacy may influence outcomes for people experiencing suicidal thoughts. The current study investigated suicide stigma and suicide literacy in a Japanese community sample (N=217), with comparison to published data and evaluation of correlates of suicide stigma and literacy. Japanese parti...

This article reviewed the development, progress, current status, and future direction of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) in Japan. First, the history of CBT in Japan was briefly reviewed, including a description of the development of two major societies and their respective journals: the Japanese Association for Behaviour Therapy (later renamed a...

Objective The current study aimed to provide a preliminary evaluation of two universal school‐based prevention programs, Emotion Regulation (ER) and Behavioral Activation (BA), by increasing resilience to manage excessive worry, a transdiagnostic feature across anxiety and depression. Method Primary school children (N = 295; 52.5% female; 8–13 yea...

Anxiety and depression are among the most common mental health issues experienced in childhood. Implementing school-based prevention programs during childhood, rather than adolescence, is thought to provide better mental health outcomes. The present meta-analysis aimed to investigate the efficacy of universal school-based prevention programs that t...

Background: Cultural factors influence both the expression of social anxiety and the interpretation and functioning of social anxiety measures. This study aimed to test the measurement equivalence of two commonly used social anxiety measures across two sociocultural contexts using individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) from Australia and J...

Two studies aimed to examine whether high socially anxious individuals are more likely to negatively interpret ambiguous social scenarios and facial expressions compared to low socially anxious individuals. We also examined whether interpretation bias serves as a mediator of the relationship between trait social anxiety and state anxiety responses,...

This study investigated the effects of combined audience feedback with video feedback plus cognitive preparation, and cognitive review (enabling deeper processing of feedback) on state anxiety and self-perceptions including perception of performance and perceived probability of negative evaluation in socially anxious individuals during a speech per...

The present study examined whether improvements in insomnia affect symptoms of worry, anxiety, depression, and impaired social functioning after transdiagnostic treatment for excessive worry. Forty-nine participants with clinical excessive worry were randomized to either a behavioral activation for worry (BAW) treatment group or a waitlist control...

This chapter delineates the transdiagnostic approach to emotion regulation in children and adolescents in terms of underlying mechanisms and unifying treatment approaches. Transdiagnostic attempts to explain the high incidence of comorbidity among related disorders, whilst enhancing understanding of the underlying mechanisms inferring commonalities...

Oral presentation at the 8th World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies, 22-25 June 2016, Melbourne

Anxiety and depression account for more than half of the burden of disease caused by mental disorders. Anxiety and depression also co-occur highly with each other, with 69% of anxious individuals being diagnosed with depression and up to 75% of depressed individuals meeting criteria for an anxiety disorder. When different classes of disorders co-oc...

This chapter discusses key issues and challenges in implementing prevention programs for depression in Japanese educational settings. The implementation of school-wide mental health programs is still in its embryonic stage in Japan. Simply translating evidence-based interventions which have been developed and evaluated in Western countries poses nu...

Although video feedback (VF) is shown to improve appraisals of social performance in socially anxious individuals, its impact on state anxiety during a social situation is mixed. The current study investigated the effect of combined video feedback and audience feedback (AF) on self-perceptions of performance and bodily sensations as well as state a...

The present study aimed to examine how perfectionism is contributing to social anxiety and its cognitive processes of post-event rumination and self-perception of performance following a speech task. Forty-eight undergraduate students completed measures of perfectionism and trait social anxiety prior to performing a 3-min impromptu speech task. Imm...

Comorbid depression is known to contribute to the maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) including distressing intrusive trauma memories. It is theorised that depression is a risk factor for persistent PTSD through preventing optimal habituation of distress provoked by trauma memories and reminders, but the underlying cognitive mechani...

Some studies have shown that socially anxious individuals are more likely than non socially anxious individuals to perceive emotional facial expressions (EFEs) as threatening, but other work has failed to demonstrate this effect. Studies of EFE processing in social anxiety have often failed to distinguish between the effects of bias, tendency to fa...

The present study examined the effect of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), cognitive appraisal of IBS, and anxiety sensitivity on anticipatory anxiety (AA) and agoraphobia (AG) in patients with panic disorder (PD). We examined 244 PD patients who completed a set of questionnaires that included the Rome II Modular Questionnaire to assess the presence...

Aim: In-situation safety behaviors play an important role in the maintenance of anxiety because they prevent patients from experiencing unambiguous disconfirmation of their unrealistic beliefs about feared catastrophes. Strategies for identifying particular safety behaviors, however, have not been sufficiently investigated. The aims of the present...

While randomized evidence appears to have established efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and some pharmacotherapy for social anxiety disorder (SAD), their real-world effectiveness has been called into question by long-term naturalistic cohort studies of patients with SAD as they show very low probability of recovery and sustained social...

The purpose of the present study was to develop a short version of the self-rating Social Skills Scale (SSS) by Koyama et al. (2002, in Japanese) for socially anxious individuals. The reliability and validity of the newly developed version was tested. The SSS-social anxiety scale had a single-factor structure and demonstrated high internal consiste...

Background: We examined the rate of bipolar I (BPD-I) and bipolar II disorders (BPD-II) in panic disorder (PD) patients, and compared clinical and psychological variables between PD patients with and without bipolar disorders (BPD). Methods: Participants were 649 Japanese patients with PD (215 men and 434 women, 38.49 710.40 years) at outpatient cl...

BACKGROUND: We examined the rate of bipolar I (BPD-I) and bipolar II disorders (BPD-II) in panic disorder (PD) patients, and compared clinical and psychological variables between PD patients with and without bipolar disorders (BPD). METHODS: Participants were 649 Japanese patients with PD (215 men and 434 women, 38.49±10.40 years) at outpatient cli...

The main aims of the present study were to compare the frequency of social phobia and taijin kyofusho symptoms among young adults in Japan and in England and to examine the role of family environment in the development of these two conditions. A total of 927 young adults (462 in England and 465 in Japan) between the ages of 19 and 24 were investiga...

The effects of video feedback and nonnegative feedback from other people were examined as possibly ameliorating distorted appraisals of bodily sensations, as well as subjective and physiological anxiety in socially anxious individuals. Nonnegative feedback from a confederate emphasized the absence of negative outcomes (e.g., did not seem to tremble...

The current study compared the predicted social and career impact of socially withdrawn and reticent behaviors among participants from Western and East Asian countries. Three hundred sixty-one college students from 5 Western countries and 455 students from 3 East Asian countries read hypothetical vignettes describing socially withdrawn and shy beha...

Social anxiety is assumed to be related to cultural norms across countries. Heinrichs et al. [2006: Behav Res Ther 44:1187-1197] compared individualistic and collectivistic countries and found higher social anxiety and more positive attitudes toward socially avoidant behaviors in collectivistic rather than in individualistic countries. However, the...

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most common anxiety disorders. The efficacy of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) has been examined but to date its effects on Quality of Life (QoL) have not been appropriately evaluated especially in the long term.The study aimed to examine, in the long term, what aspects of Quality of Life (QoL) changed...

The present study aimed to examine how video feedback can affect perceived performance and anticipatory anxiety in various naturalistic social anxiety-provoking situations among clinical patients diagnosed with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and to examine predictors that might influence response to video feedback. Participants were 52 consecutive p...

The relationship between negative interpretation of bodily sensations and social anxiety was investigated, and hypothesized cognitive models were tested using structural equation modeling in performance and social interactive situations. The following interpretations of bodily sensations were examined: (1) the overestimation of the visibility of bo...

This study investigated whether high socially anxious individuals interpret other people’s ambiguous behavior in a more negative or threatening manner in comparison to low socially anxious individuals, after controlling for the effects of depression. High and low socially anxious participants (N=31) gave a speech. During the speech, a confederate p...

Background: Safety behaviour plays an important role in the maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). SAD patients engage in various safety behaviours in social situations in order to decrease the risk of negative evaluations from others. Aims: The present study examined the effect of safety behaviour on the maintenance of anxiety and negative...

Problem-solving therapy (PST) is a brief, structured psychological treatment. Preliminary clinical findings regarding the effectiveness of PST for treating psychological distress experienced by Japanese cancer patients are presented. Our actual clinical experience in administering PST to four consecutive distressed cancer patients was reviewed. All...

Safety behavior (SB) and self-focused attention (SFA) have been posited as important maintenance factors in the cognitive model of social anxiety disorder (SAD). The present study reports the results of experiments to drop SB and SFA among clinically diagnosed patients with SAD employing their own idiosyncratic anxiety-provoking situations. The rat...

Non-fearful panic attacks constitute a subgroup of panic attacks without the experience of subjective fear. However, previous studies were mostly carried out under medical settings and with small samples. The present study aims to clarify and expand the previous findings including the prevalence and characteristics of non-fearful panic attacks by u...

Aim: The aim of this paper is to report the outcomes and follow-up data of our cognitive behavioral therapy program for Japanese patients with panic disorder and to examine the baseline predictors of their outcomes. Methods: Seventy outpatients with panic disorder with or without agoraphobia were treated with manualized group cognitive behavioral t...

Conviction subtype Taijin-Kyofu (c-TK) is a subgroup of mental disorder characterized by conviction and strong fear of offending others in social situations. Although the concept of c-TK overlaps with that of social anxiety disorder (SAD), patients with c-TK often may not be diagnosed as such within the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of...

A number of studies have provided strong evidence for the use of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) in the treatment of social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, all of the previous reports were from Europe and North America and it is unknown whether Western psychological therapies are effective for SAD in non-Western cultures. The present pilot study...

Cognitive model of panic disorder have proposed that panic attacks result from the catastrophic misinterpretation of certain bodily sensations. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for panic disorder aims to change these catastrophic cognitions. CBT intervention successfully caused reduction of catastrophic cognitions and symptomatic improvement in t...

Although a number of recent studies have shown that panic disorder is associated with deterioration in quality of life and social dysfunctions, details of these impairments and their correlates have not been well studied. The present study aims to examine which aspects of quality of life and social functioning were particularly impaired in patients...

The purpose of this study was to develop a shorter version of the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (FNE; Watson & Friend, 1969) for the Japanese population. Item characteristics and measurement accuracy for both the original version and the short version were evaluated within the context of item-response theory (IRT). Graded response model (GRM) w...