Moniek Hutschemaekers

47 Endogenous testosterone levels are predictive of symptom reduction with exposure therapy in social anxiety disorder posure therapy for SAD (Davis et al., 2017); clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02482805. The experiment was performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Participants received one personalized exposure therapy session modeled after the procedures outlined by (see below (Rodebaugh et al., 2013)), and were randomly assigned to submissive, dominant, or neutral power pose groups. In line with previous work (Ranehill, Dreber, Johannesson, Sul, & Weber, 2016; Simmons & Simonsohn, 2017), the findings, reported by Davis et al. (2017), revealed that engaging in power versus submissive posing resulted in no single differential effect in terms of symptom reduction, in-session fear responses nor with respect to testosterone responses (Davis et al., 2017). This paper also reported that there was no relation between testosterone reactivity to the power pose manipulation (i.e., pre- to post-posing) and the reductions in symptoms following exposure therapy. Therefore, to address the current research question, testing the effects of pre-treatment testosterone levels on therapy outcome, we could collapse the data across the power pose groups. The posing together with the therapy rationale and instructions formed a pre-treatment instruction period during which we measured testosterone reactivity, enabling for the first time testing the predictive effects of pre-treatment testosterone levels on exposure therapy outcome in a well-powered sample of patients with SAD. Exposure session Participants all completed one standardized exposure session, based on the protocol developed by Rodebaugh, Levinson, and Lenze (2013). During this session, participants planned a 5-min speech exposure which they expected to elicit considerable fear (i.e. predicting a fear rating of 75 on a scale from 0 (no fear) to 100 (extreme fear)); participants were first familiarized with the rating scale and anchors. Participants completed the same speech-exposure three times during the session (i.e. 3 x 5 minutes) in front of a small public, including the therapist and 0-3 confederates. This method has been used in previous studies examining exposure effects in SAD (Powers, Smits, & Telch, 2004; Ressler et al., 2004; Sloan & Telch, 2002; Smits, Rosenfield, Otto, et al., 2013b; Telch et al., 2014; Wolitzky & Telch, 2009). Outcome Measures In-session fear Participants rated their highest fear level during the exposure (i.e., peak fear) using Subjective Units of Distress (SUDs) (Wolpe & Lazarus, 1966) scale (ranging from 0; no fear to 100; extreme fear) immediately after each of the four exposure practice exercises. 3

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