Here we Test Out an Online Compassion Focused Intervention for Adolescents With Social Anxiety Disorder and Analyze Its Effect on (Self)Compassion, Emotion Regulation and Social Anxiety Symptoms, as Well as Heart Rate Variability.

Plain-language summary

Emotion regulation (ER) is a key competence developed mainly throughout adolescence. According to an evolutionary perspective, threat, drive, and soothing systems interact to achieve ER. Difficulties in ER are transdiagnostic features in different psychopathologies and have been hypothesized as resulting from an unbalance of these ER systems. Research findings support Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as a biomarker of ER in adolescents. Higher HRV associates with adaptive ER; lower HRV associates with difficulties in ER and with both Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Conduct Disorder (CD). This project aims to test for differences in HRV patterns linked to the triggering of different ER systems, contrasting healthy controls with clinical adolescent samples (SAD vs. CD). Compassion-focused interventions have been effective in reducing SAD symptom severity in adults; however, this approach was not tested in pediatric samples. Here we test the efficacy of an online-delivered compassion focused intervention for teens with Social Anxiety Disorder and assess its effect on (self)compassion, fears of compassion, social safeness, emotion regulation and social anxiety symptoms, as well as Heart Rate Variability.

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