Mapping network connectivity among symptoms of social anxiety and comorbid depression in people with social anxiety disorder

摘要

Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) and depressive symptoms often covary. Yet, uncertainty still abounds vis-a-vis the individual symptom-to-symptom associations between these two disorders. Inspired by the network approach to psychopathology that conceptualizes comorbidity as a natural consequence arising from bridge symptoms that can transmit activation from one disorder to the other, we applied network analytic methods to characterize the associations among core symptoms of SAD-i.e. fear and avoidance of social situations-and comorbid depressive symptoms among 174 individuals with DSM-IV-TR criteria for SAD.