2026 Autumn Workshop 5

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most common mental disorders, and it can have severely detrimental impacts on an individual’s ability to reach their social and occupational potential. People with SAD have a core fear of evaluation from others, which is maintained by factors such as negative thoughts and images relating to social threat, avoidance and safety behaviours, self-focused attention, negative core beliefs about the self and others, and anticipatory and post-event processing.

CBT is highly effective for treating SAD, although a significant proportion of people do not recover. This webinar will outline how mental imagery can be integrated throughout CBT for SAD to increase affective engagement and improve outcomes.

The workshop will outline our approach to delivering imagery-enhanced CBT in groups and individually. Group-based CBT has recently demonstrated very large within-group effect sizes, which are much larger than the early trials, and suggest that it is a highly effective mode of treatment delivery. We will describe some of our outcomes and service efficiencies from offering group CBT, along with the rationale for integrating imagery-based techniques throughout CBT for SAD. The workshop will focus on practical imagery-based CBT techniques within the protocol.

Key learning objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Understand the rationale and evidence for integrating mental imagery in CBT for social anxiety disorder

• Understand how to integrate mental imagery into a client-friendly case formulation template to guide psychoeducation and treatment components

• Understand how to integrate mental imagery into treatment components including cognitive restructuring, behavioural experiments, modifying self-images, attentional flexibility training, and modification of negative core beliefs.

Biography

Peter McEvoy is a Professor of Clinical Psychology within the School of Population Health and the enAble Institute at Curtin University, and he is a Senior Clinical Psychologist at the Centre for Clinical Interventions. Peter co-ordinates and teaches adult psychopathology and psychotherapy in the clinical masters program at Curtin University, and is also the Research Director at the Centre for Clinical Interventions. Peter has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles on the assessment and treatment of emotional disorders, and has specialised in the treatment of social anxiety disorder in particular. He has personally facilitated over 50 social anxiety groups in his clinical roles. Peter has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Anxiety Disorders since 2015 and is on the editorial boards of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy and the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology. Peter was the recipient of the Distinguished Career Award from the Australian Association of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy in 2021 in recognition of his exceptional contribution to CBT through research, teaching and clinical innovation.

Key references  

McEvoy, P. M., Hyett, M. P., Bank, S. R., Erceg-Hurn, D. M., Johnson, A. R., Kyron, M. J., Saulsman, L. M., Moulds, M. L., Grisham, J. R., Holmes, E. A., Moscovitch, D. A., Lipp, O. V. Campbell, B. N. C., & Rapee, R. M. (2022). Imagery-enhanced versus verbally-based group cognitive behavior therapy for social anxiety disorder: a randomized clinical trial. Psychological Medicine, 52, 1277-1286. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0033291720003001

McEvoy, P. M., & Saulsman, L. (2014). Imagery-enhanced cognitive behavioural group therapy for social anxiety disorder: A pilot study. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 55, 1-6. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2014.01.006

McEvoy, P. M., Saulsman, L. M., & Rapee, R. M. (2018). Imagery-enhanced CBT for social anxiety disorder. Guilford Press.