Neural Correlates of Psychotherapy: Insights from exposure based Social Anxiety Treatment

Research on optimizing exposure based cognitive therapy (CBT) for individuals with social anxiety disorders (SAD) lead to exploring effects of an Intensified Psychological In-tervention (IPI). This work focuses on examining brain structure alterations in healthy controls (HC, n = 99) and SAD patients (n = 113) that were either treated with CBT or IPI to help understand underlying neurobiological mechanisms behind psychotherapy. T1 weighted structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data taken before and after 12 sessions of psychotherapy were used to employ a voxel-based-morphometry (VBM) in predefined regions of interests (ROIs) consisting of areas associated with emotion regulation, and cognitive and motor control.