Metaphorical Framing for the Treatment of Social Anxiety

In this study, the objective was to assess how effective different coping mechanisms are at managing social anxiety. In my experimental manipulation, I attempted to gauge if a new method of anxiety reduction was effective, and if so how it compared to another clinically endorsed method. Participants were administered a task to induce mild social anxiety, where they were told they would be giving an impromptu speech that would be watched and evaluated by professors. They were instructed to use one of three coping mechanisms for managing any social anxiety during the task: (1) a controlled breathing exercise, (2) cognitive reappraisal, or (3) metaphorical framing plus reappraisal. The results indicated that cognitive reappraisal was the most effective method for the reduction of anxiety. However, certain design limitations, along with the exploratory nature of this study, leave open the possibility that metaphorical reappraisal may be an effective coping strategy. This could be the beginning in a line of research to utilize cognitive mechanisms for treatment of social anxiety in ways that have not been tried before.