LuisJoaquin Garcia-Lopez, Ph.D.

My major scientific and scholar contributions are focused on: (a) designing a screening protocol to increase the number of clinically social anxious children and adolescents. It’s striking the number of children and adolescents who do not benefit from appropriate psychological or pharmacological treatments due to the lack of awareness and detection of internalized disorders such as anxiety by parents, teachers and commonly, even the same children and (b) designing and validating psychological tests, mostly developed in USA, for European population. It is clear that no treatment can be conducted if an appropriate assessment is conducted.

Along with my efforts to maximize the number of children with anxiety disorders who are detected and assessed, and so, can benefit from evidence-based interventions, my early career has been focused on developing and enhancing treatment protocols aimed at overcoming children’s social anxiety problems. If untreated, childhood social anxiety disorder is persistent and interfere with emotional, school/employment, familial lives. Given that psychological treatments exist and are proven to be effective, this should no longer be true. In order to palliate this situation, I have been working disseminating of evidence-based school interventions, working closely with school-policymakers.

Another interest I have been exploring is the role that ‘expressed emotion’ and 'emotional intelligence' play in treatment outcome for childhood social anxiety. More recently, I’ve become interested in the issues that surround clinical linguistics and psychology, including how corpus linguistics can provide insight and input to assessment and treatment of social anxiety disorder.  Research lines in progress are focused on RCT trial on MAGT, CBT and credible placebo for speaking anxiety, and a longitudinal study on Behavioral Inhibition.