Unlocking Social Anxiety Disorder: A Personalized Approach Through Formal Psychological Assessment

The study looks into the application of Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA), a new methodology that seeks to transcend the assessment of symptoms by delving into the individual's psychological functioning in a structured and dynamic way to guide personalized therapeutic interventions (Spoto, Bottesi, Sanavio, & Vidotto, 2013), as applied to Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), a mental disorder characterized by intense fear of social situations involving the possibility of being evaluated or criticized by others, often leading to significant distress and functional impairment (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). For this study, nine widely recognized questionnaires for assessing social anxiety disorder on a self-reported basis were initially chosen; however, only seven of them were included in the final model. The criteria for diagnosing social anxiety disorder were established using the DSM-5, relevant literature, and the theories proposed by Seligman and Beck. A Boolean matrix was constructed for the items evaluating SAD, with 137 questionnaire items in the rows and 20 diagnostic attributes selected from the symptoms of this disorder. The matrix indicated whether each item addressed a specific attribute, allowing for the analysis of relationships both between items and attributes and among the items themselves. Representative items from the Boolean matrix were selected to develop a refined and complete prototype item set for measuring SAD. This step eliminated some of the items but made sure that all important diagnostic items were included. The resulting set of items was then evaluated for its ability to map onto the diagnostic attributes of SAD. As a result of the created matrix, each item's relationship to its attribute was emphasized, which allows future analyses of response patterns to be made, thereby opening the way for the development of a more adaptive assessment tool to diagnose SAD.