Title

Informant Discrepancies In Adult Social Anxiety Disorder Assessments: Links With Contextual Variations In Observed Behavior

Keywords

Correspondence; Informant discrepancies; Multiple informants; Operations Triad Model; Social anxiety disorder

Abstract

Multi-informant assessments of adult psychopathology often result in discrepancies among informants' reports. Among 157 adults meeting criteria for either the generalized (n =106) or nongeneralized (n =51) social anxiety disorder (SAD) subtype, we examined whether discrepancies between patients' and clinicians' reports of patients' symptoms related to variations in both SAD subtype and expressions of social skills deficits across multiple social interaction tasks. Latent class analyses revealed two behavioral patterns: (a) context-specific social skills deficits and (b) cross-context social skills deficits.Similarly, patients' symptom reports could be characterized by concordance or discordance with clinicians' reports. Patient- clinician concordance on relatively high levels of patients' symptoms related to an increased likelihood of the patient meeting criteria for the generalized relative to nongeneralized subtype. Further, patient- clinician concordance on relatively high levels of patients' symptoms related to an increased likelihood of consistently exhibiting social skills deficits across social interaction tasks (relative to context-specific social skills deficits). These relations were robust in accounting forpatient age, clinical severity, and Axis I and II comorbidity. Further, clinical severity did not completely explain variability in patients' behavior on laboratory tasks or discrepancies between patient and clinician reports. Findings provide the first laboratory-based support for the ability of informant discrepancies to indicate crosscontextual variability in clinical adult assessments, and the first of any developmental period to indicate this for SAD assessments. These findings have important implications for clinical assessment and developmental psychopathology research. © 2013 American Psychological Association.

Publication Date

1-1-2013

Publication Title

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Volume

122

Issue

2

Number of Pages

376-386

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031150

Socpus ID

84878502215 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84878502215

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