The factor structure of the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) and the Social Phobia Scale (SPS) was evaluated in a Spanish university student sample. The objective of this study was to examine whether these scales are reliable measures in other languages and/or cultures. High levels of internal consistency were found. The results from the factor analyses replicated the structure proposed by the original authors and revealed that both scales are unidimensional and appear to measure different aspects of the social anxiety construct. Further, as in previous studies, gender differences were found on the SPS but not on the SIAS. Results support the psychometric properties of both the SIAS and the SPS in the assessment of Spanish-speaking samples.

The role that parents' involvement may play in improving their child's social anxiety is still under debate. This paper aimed to investigate whether training parents with high expressed emotion (EE) could improve outcomes for adolescent social anxiety intervention. Fifty-two socially anxious adolescents (aged 13-18 years), whose parents exhibited high levels of expressed emotion, were assigned to either (a) a school-based intervention with an added parent training component, or (b) a school-based program focused solely on intervening with the adolescent (no parental involvement). Post-treatment and 12-month follow-up findings showed that school-based intervention with parent training was superior to the adolescent-specific program, yielding significant reductions in diagnosis remission, social and depressive symptomatology, particularly when the EE status of parents changed. Overall, the findings suggest that high-EE parents of children with social anxiety need to be involved in their child's therapy.