As you might have guessed from my ‘playtime with Siri’, I’m a gadget geek and so when I see gadget plus possible health benefit I am intrigued. I found the article below (I’ve copied the whole article but also included the link) about an app being designed for the iPhone to help people with Social Anxiety.
I’m ‘new’ to this Social anxiety lark, I knew I had issues being amongst people and doing certain things but I’ve only been diagnosed recently. Apparently, people with SA when in a crowd would automatically have their gaze distracted by hostile faces rather than friendly faces. The app in development has a friendly and hostile face and then merges them together flashing a letter over the top. You need to identify what the letter is. By taking your focus away from the faces and onto concentrating on the letter you are not worrying which face is hostile and which is friendly, ‘The app helps break this fixation, re-training the brain and reducing anxiety.‘
I’m a willing to give things a go but I am a bit dubious about this. Firstly, don’t we all read expressions on people’s faces differently? Who is to say that my version of hostile is the same as your version of hostile, and equally, my version of friendly the same as your version of friendly? Part of SA is that we take criticism badly and see looks, glances, words that others see as insignificant as criticism, hence people giving this perceived criticism would appear hostile. I have a very difficult time decided what someones face is telling me!
What do you think?
By Tecca | Today in Tech – Tue, Feb 14, 2012
We recently reported on smartphone app Mobilyze, a program under development that’s capable of diagnosing mental health issues. A team of researchers at Harvard University are working on the logical next step: A smartphone app that can help treat mental health issues — in this case, social anxiety.
The app uses a simple approach developed by an Australian psychologist. Users of the app are shown two different faces on their phone screen: One friendly and one hostile. The program merges the faces together, and then flashes a letter that you need to correctly identify.
It’s believed that those with social anxiety tend to fixate on faces in the crowd who are hostile. The app helps break this fixation, re-training the brain and reducing anxiety.
Recent studies show that using the new smartphone app helped reduce subjects’ anxiety by 22 points on a questionnaire, as compared to an 8-point drop experienced by a group who didn’t use the app. But before you start trading in your doctor for an iPhone, it’s important to note that not everyone believes that the app is special: A similar 22-point drop was experienced by a control group who looked at pairs of faces without the letter to distract them.
It could just be that the key to feeling better is simply the act of taking the initiative and doing something about your anxiety. According to one Chicago-area control group participant in the study, “I felt good about myself, that I was doing something for my issues, and a lot happened in those two months outside the study that could have helped.”
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