Faculty Research Award

Heimberg ahead of the curve in targeting social anxiety disorder

Heimberg

Psychology professor Richard Heimberg, winner of the Paul Eberman Faculty Research Award at last week’s Faculty Awards convocation, remembers taking his first intro to psych course as an undergraduate.

“I hated it,” he said with a smile.

So how does he explain earning his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in psychology, followed by a master’s and doctorate, and a career trajectory that has built his reputation as a pioneering researcher and the leading authority in the field of social anxiety disorder?

“That first course, I had to take — my mother is a psychologist and insisted I take one psych course, or there would be no tuition for me!”

Fortunately for all, Heimberg took another course, this one in abnormal psychology with a professor who “brought the whole thing to life.”

“He spent time with me. My grades went from a 2.5 to a 4.0, and suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do.”

As a graduate student at Florida State University in the 1970s, he became interested in how interpersonal relationships get impaired by what he now calls “social anxiety.” At the time, he notes, there were no such labels.

His first research study involved 75 college men with dating anxiety. As a behavior assessment tool, Heimberg asked each to have a conversation with a woman to determine their level of anxiety. To measure the severity of their dysfunction, the subjects had to role-play and ask a woman for a date. “They were terrified,” Heimberg said. “I remember one guy asked to use the men’s room first. He never reappeared — he had to have gone out the second-story window down the hall from the lab!”

Back then, there were a dozen different explanations for the dysfunction — from shyness to dating anxiety, to communication apprehension and public speaking anxiety — but no formal diagnosis.

“Without a diagnosis, there is no recognition of the disorder as something that needs treatment — and hence, no funded research by the National Institute of Mental Health. The NIMH is about health and disease: Having the ‘blahs’ is not a disease. Being depressed, however, is a recognized illness.”

It was 1980 when “social phobia” first appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and three years later, Heimberg received an NIMH grant to study the effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy in treating social anxiety — the first NIMH-funded award for psychological treatment-oriented research of the disorder.

Since that first research study by Heimberg while he was on the faculty at SUNY-Albany (he came to Temple in 1996), he has been awarded three additional grants with funding totaling $5 million and has soared to the forefront of his field.

“He is without question the world’s leading authority on the psychopathology and treatment of social phobia [social anxiety disorder],” writes Richard J. McNally, director of clinical training in the psychology department at Harvard. “Despite its prevalence, social phobia was seldom the target of treatment development efforts — until Rick entered the scene."

Much of his work has been done in collaboration with Michael Liebowitz, a psychiatrist and director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York Psychiatric Institute. The two researchers received the NIMH’s first-ever multidisciplinary, multi-site grant to study both psychological and pharmacological treatment regimens for the disorder.

Heimberg acknowledges he has seen dramatic changes in the field — changes that were significantly driven by his own work.

“There is increasing awareness of the role that cognition plays,” he said. “We knew people’s emotions were impaired when they were experiencing a great deal of anxiety, but we were not as aware that people misinterpret situations and overestimate the amount of social danger in situations, selectively remembering bad outcomes.”

Social anxiety is now recognized as the third-most-common mental disorder, behind depression and alcoholism. At Temple’s Adult Anxiety Clinic, which he directs, Heimberg and his researchers are helping clients afflicted with social anxiety deal with their feelings of inadequacy and fear.

“There is still much education to be done to make people aware of the public health impact. Many people with social anxiety have been afflicted for years; the average person who comes to us for treatment has been suffering for 20 years,” he pointed out. “Research shows that these are people who are more likely to drop out of high school and end up on welfare, and to have depression and alcohol problems, and they are less likely to get married and have children.”

People are generally reluctant to seek treatment, he says, noting that they find it difficult to understand what is troubling them.

The good news is that the research is yielding positive outcomes.

"Three-quarters of the people who come through the study have gotten substantial benefit from the treatment. We see them doing things they had shunned before and starting to put their lives together.”

The author of eight books and more than 250 articles on social anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder and related topics, Heimberg is past president of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy and currently serves as editor of Behavior Therapy, the AABT’s flagship journal. He is a founding fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy and was named one of the four most influential psychological researchers in anxiety in a survey of members of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America.

This week, Heimberg will be honored yet again when he receives the Doctoral Graduate of Distinction Award from the psychology department at Florida State University.

For the much-celebrated researcher, the greatest rewards lie in the professorial life.

- By Harriet Goodheart