Avoidance and fear day by day in social anxiety disorder.

Objective: Theories assert that avoidance maintains maladaptive anxiety over time, yet a clear prospective test of this effect in the day-by-day lives of people with social anxiety disorder (SAD) is lacking.

Method: We used intensive longitudinal data to test prospective relationships between social fear and social avoidance in 32 participants with SAD who reported on a total of 4256 time points.

Results: Results suggested that avoidance strongly predicted future anxiety, but only in a minority of people with SAD.