The Intergenerational Transmission of Social Phobia

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The study concerns a form of emotional disturbance known as ‘social phobia’. People who suffer from social phobia intensely fear that they will humiliate or embarrass themselves. About one in four of the children of someone with social phobia develop the disorder themselves. Genetics plays some part in this, but parenting is likely also to be important. We have been studying a group of mothers and their children, from pregnancy until the child was two years old. The mothers either have social phobia, another form of anxiety (chronic worrying), or have never been anxious. A significant proportion of the children of the mothers with social anxiety themselves show early signs of social anxiety. This anxiety is associated with mothers displaying their own social anxiety to their children and not supporting and encouraging their children with strangers. We now wish to assess these children when they start school at age five, to learn how the children of socially anxious mothers cope with this situation and how the mothers do or do not help them. It is known that anxious children of anxious parents do not respond to treatment as well as other anxious children. This study will contribute to the development of new treatments for these children.