THE IMPACT OF PERSONALITY-DISORDERS ON BEHAVIORAL TREATMENT OUTCOME FOR SOCIAL PHOBIA

The impact of personality disorders (PDs) on exposure in pipe treatmen t for social phobia was investigated in three groups of social phobics : social phobia without any PD (n = 30), social phobia with a single d iagnosis of avoidant PD (n = 18) and social phobia with multiple PDs ( n = 13). We hypothesized parallel change for social phobia with and wi thout an avoidant PD with the latter group being more impaired before and after treatment. In order to test this hypothesis, confidence inte rvals for change were computed. In line with our hypothesis, social ph obics in all three groups improved significantly during treatment and no interaction effects were found on the repeated MANOVAs. By using a confidence interval, parallel change was found on most measures. The i mpact of additional anxiety and mood disorders on treatment outcome wa s investigated separately. The analyses showed that an additional anxi ety or mood disorder also did not predict outcome of exposure treatmen t. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.