Cognitive behavioral group therapy (CBGT) will be delivered by two Ph.D. clinical psychologists trained by Dr. Richard Heimberg to implement his CBGT for SAD (Heimberg & Becker, 2002). Groups of six individuals will meet for 12 sessions of 2.5 hours each. The participants will also use selected portions of the client workbook developed by (Hope, Heimberg, & Turk, 2010) to supplement relevant portions of the protocol. The treatment will be comprised of four major components: (1) psychoeducation and orientation to CBGT; (2) cognitive restructuring skills; (3) graduated exposure to feared social situations, within session and as homework; and (4) relapse prevention and termination. Further details of the treatment are available elsewhere (Heimberg & Becker, 2002).

MBSR will follow the standard curriculum outline compiled in 1993 by Jon Kabat-Zinn except that the one-day meditation retreat will be converted to four additional weekly group sessions between the standard class 6 and 7 so that there will be 12 weekly 2.5 hour sessions. This will be done to match the CBGT protocol in duration and time. The MBSR intervention will be delivered by a University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness certified MBSR instructor with more than 30 years of teaching experience. To support the practice, each participant will be given A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook (Stahl & Goldstein, 2010), which includes descriptions of mindfulness exercises together with pre-recorded audio files to support ongoing practice.

This will be a delayed treatment arm. Participants randomized to the waitlist control group will be re-randomized after completing the no treatment period of 12 weeks to CBGT or MBSR with equal probability.

Cognitive Behavioral Group Therapy for social anxiety disorder is a 12-week treatment that involves psychoeducation, cognitive restructuring and exposure to social situations.

The Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) is a self-report questionnaire which assesses the severity of social anxiety symptoms (Fresco et al., 2001; Liebowitz, 1987). Respondents are asked to rate their level of fear and avoidance to 11 social interaction situations and 13 performance situations. A 4-point Likert-type scale is used for ratings of fear and of avoidance, with a range from 0 (none and never, respectively) to 3 (severe and usually, respectively) for each situation during the past week. Ratings are summed for a total LSAS-SR score (range 0 to 144). The LSAS-SR has demonstrated good reliability and construct validity (Rytwinski et al., 2009).