Psychological factors in skin conditions

The first chapter of the thesis is a meta-analytic review investigating the effectiveness of psychological interventions for skin conditions. Twenty-one controlled trials are included and results indicate a medium average effect size of psychological interventions on outcomes relating to itch/scratch and outcomes relating to psychosocial functioning and a small average effect size on outcomes relating to skin severity. The overall average effect of psychological interventions on skin conditions was found to be medium. Ten moderating variables relating to the type of skin conditions, the nature of the interventions and methodological characteristics of the studies were also investigated. The review concluded that psychological interventions have a beneficial effect on skin conditions. Recommendations for future research and clinical practice are explored. There is extensive literature linking the distress experienced by people with skin conditions to social anxiety. As attentional biases are implicated in the aetiology and maintenance of social anxiety, the second part of the thesis investigates their presence in people with skin conditions and matched controls, using the Visual Dot Probe task. To explore what factors predict attentional biases, measures of social anxiety, appearance concerns, shame and self-esteem were administered. An attentional bias was found away from positive words, however no attentional biases were found towards social and appearance threat words. Low levels of shame and self-esteem predicted the attentional bias away from positive words. No other factors predicted variance in response latencies to the word groups.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo