Efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in the Treatment of Social Phobia among Adolescents in Secondary Schools in Oyo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Social phobia is a mental health problem that has been repeatedly linked with adolescents. This study therefore investigated the efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) on social phobia among secondary school adolescents in Oyo State, Nigeria. The study adopted a pretest – posttest control group quasi experimental design. The sample comprised of 104 secondary school adolescents identified with some levels of social phobia from the two randomly selected schools among the three senatorial districts of Oyo State. The selected students, grouped by schools and subsequently, treatment groups, were 51 and 53 for the control and experimental groups, respectively. The experimentation spanned a period of eight weeks, with ACT administered to the experimental group and placebo of leadership styles administered to the control group. The Social Phobia Inventory (SPI) was adopted and used for screening and in pretest and posttest stages. A statistical hypothesis was formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance by means of the Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). It was found that treatment with ACT significantly reduced the level of social phobia among school-going adolescents. ACT was therefore recommended for use in relieving school-going adolescents suffering from social phobia.

Psychological inflexibility explains social anxiety over time: a mediation analyses with a clinical adolescent sample

“…Despite its significant prevalence rates in adolescence (e.g., Alves et al, 2022 ), evidence regarding the processes contributing to social anxiety in this developmental period is still scarce. There is promising evidence regarding the applicability of ACT to understand and intervene in internalizing disorders (Landy et al, 2015 ; Twohig & Levin, 2017 ), including adult (e.g., Caletti et al, 2022 ) and adolescent SAD (Oyetunde & Ajibola, 2019 ). However, evidence considering the ACT related psychological processes and their relationship with social anxiety in clinical samples of adolescents is limited.…”

“…Moreover, results from a sample of inpatient adolescents (including adolescents with SAD) showed a significant relationship between anxiety disorders and experiential avoidance (Venta et al, 2012 ). Some studies have shown that ACT applied to adolescents with SAD is effective in treating this disorder in comparison to a control group (Oyetunde & Ajibola, 2019 ) and that ACT may play an important role in reducing social anxiety and in increasing distress tolerance and emotional regulation in adolescents (Roohi et al, 2019 ).…”

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in a Low-Income Country in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Call for Further Research

“…Additionally, six studies investigated the impact of an ACT intervention on mental health outcomes in different groups of participants, i.e., South Sudanese refugee women in Uganda ( 65 , 66 ), HIV-positive pregnant women in Nigeria ( 62 ), adults with epilepsy in South Africa ( 15 ), spiritually abused senior secondary public school students in Nigeria ( 64 ), adolescents with social phobia attending public secondary school in Nigeria ( 61 ), and patients diagnosed with substance use disorder and suffering from addiction to psychoactive drugs in Nigeria ( 63 ). In a feasibility study from Uganda published in 2018 ( 65 ), 25 South Sudanese refugee women underwent an ACT-based stress management intervention called Self-Help Plus (SH+), consisting of two components: a pre-recorded course and a self-help book ( 67 ).…”

“…One RCT included 180 spiritually abused students and found that a weekly 40-min ACT session delivered over 8 weeks was more effective than a DBT intervention and control condition in increasing social competence ( 64 ). Another RCT among 104 adolescents with social phobia compared an 8-weeks ACT intervention to a control condition, and researchers observed a significant reduction of social phobia in the ACT intervention group ( 61 ). The third study from Nigeria recruited 60 participants diagnosed with substance use disorder and suffering from addiction to psychoactive drugs and randomly assigned them to either an ACT intervention group, psychoeducation intervention group or control group.…”

“…Though these studies differed in terms of study population, characteristics of the ACT intervention and measurements, all revealed significant improvements of various mental health-related outcome measures in the groups that received an ACT-based intervention, such as decreased psychological distress and increased subjective wellbeing ( 65 , 66 ), improved post-traumatic stress, depression symptoms, explosive anger, and functional impairment ( 66 ), increased psychological flexibility ( 58 , 62 ), increased life satisfaction ( 58 ), increased social competence ( 64 ), reduced social phobia ( 61 ), and reduced symptoms of suffering from addiction to psychoactive drugs ( 63 ). Of note, ACT was also associated with significant decreases in seizure frequency and seizure index among epilepsy patients but not in the supportive therapy groups ( 15 ).…”