Social Anxiety vs Agoraphobia: Judgment Fear vs Escape and Safety Concerns
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: October 1, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia can make the same train, shopping center, restaurant, theater, crowd, or public event feel threatening. The diagnostic difference is usually found less in the place than in the feared consequence. In social anxiety disorder, the organizing fear is social scrutiny and negative evaluation: being judged, embarrassed, humiliated, rejected, or seen as visibly anxious. In agoraphobia, the organizing fear concerns escape, access to help, or safety if panic-like, incapacitating, or embarrassing symptoms occur. The American Psychiatric Association describes these as distinct anxiety disorders and emphasizes those different fear structures.
That distinction matters because outward behavior can be nearly identical. Two people may both sit near an exit, avoid a packed subway car, refuse a crowded restaurant, or ask a companion to come along. One may be trying to prevent being watched while blushing or trembling; the other may be trying to guarantee a quick escape if dizziness, panic, nausea, or a sense of losing control appears. A third person may have both patterns. Diagnosis depends on the complete pattern of fear, prediction, avoidance, persistence, distress, impairment, and differential assessment—not on a single situation or symptom.
Social anxiety vs agoraphobia: the shortest accurate answer
Social anxiety disorder is primarily about what other people may think, notice, or do in response to you. Agoraphobia is primarily about what may happen if you become distressed or incapacitated in a place where escape or help feels difficult. This is a clinical comparison of Social Anxiety Disorder and Agoraphobia; the everyday phrase “social anxiety” can also refer to ordinary social nervousness or subclinical symptoms. For that distinction, see Social Anxiety vs Social Anxiety Disorder: Symptoms vs Clinical Diagnosis.
A useful one-sentence test is: What is the person predicting will go wrong? “People will see me shaking, think I am incompetent, and reject me” is a social-evaluative prediction. “I will become dizzy, trapped, unable to get out, and nobody will be able to help me” is an escape-and-safety prediction. Real assessments go much further, but this question often reveals why the same avoided setting can belong to different diagnostic patterns.
The difference is the feared outcome, not the location
Social anxiety disorder: scrutiny and negative evaluation
The National Institute of Mental Health describes social anxiety disorder as intense fear or anxiety in situations where a person may be scrutinized, evaluated, or judged. The person may fear humiliation, rejection, appearing incompetent, saying the wrong thing, blushing, sweating, trembling, going blank, or displaying anxiety in a way that others could notice.
The social audience is therefore central. A person may be able to ride an almost empty bus but become highly anxious when it is crowded because other passengers could observe them. Someone may tolerate a restaurant booth with a trusted partner but avoid eating at a visible table because they fear being watched. The feared outcome is not simply discomfort in public; it is the meaning assigned to other people's attention and evaluation.
Agoraphobia: escape, help, and safety
Agoraphobia is organized differently. The American Psychiatric Association describes fear of situations where escape may be difficult or embarrassing, or help may not be available if panic symptoms occur. Typical categories include public transportation, open spaces, enclosed places, lines or crowds, and being outside the home alone. The person may avoid such settings, need a companion, or endure them with intense fear. See the English Hub overview Agoraphobia: Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, and Treatment for the broader diagnostic territory.
The feared event can involve panic-like symptoms, but panic is not the only route. A person may fear fainting, vomiting, becoming disoriented, losing bladder or bowel control, becoming unable to continue walking, or otherwise being incapacitated where leaving or receiving help would feel difficult. The central question is whether the situation is feared because escape, assistance, or perceived safety feels compromised.
Why embarrassment does not settle the diagnosis
Embarrassment appears in both disorders, so the word itself is not enough. In social anxiety disorder, embarrassment is tied to social evaluation: “They will think badly of me.” In agoraphobia, embarrassment can be downstream of an incapacitating event: “If I collapse here, I cannot get out and people will see what happens.” The RANZCP clinical practice guideline highlights this differential logic: overlapping situations are distinguished by the principal underlying fear rather than by the setting alone.
Same situation, different fear: four examples
Public transportation
A person with social anxiety disorder may avoid a subway because standing face-to-face with strangers feels exposing, because they fear visible shaking, or because asking someone to move could draw attention. A person with agoraphobia may avoid the same subway because doors close between stations, leaving feels impossible, and help seems unavailable if severe symptoms appear. Someone with both disorders may fear both being trapped and being watched while distressed.
A crowded store or shopping center
Social-anxiety fear may focus on interacting with staff, being observed while making choices, making a mistake at checkout, or visibly blushing in line. Agoraphobic fear may focus on the distance to an exit, the crowd blocking escape, becoming dizzy far from the door, or needing a companion to feel able to remain. Merely saying “I avoid malls” does not identify the diagnosis.
Restaurants, theaters, and public events
In a restaurant, social anxiety may center on eating in front of others, conversation, ordering, or being judged. Agoraphobia may center on being seated far from an exit, being unable to leave without disruption, or fearing illness or panic in a place that feels hard to escape. In theaters and arenas, aisle position, exit access, crowd density, and perceived availability of help may become especially relevant to agoraphobic fear.
Being outside the home alone
Being outside home alone is a classic agoraphobic domain because distance from a perceived safe base or support person can magnify escape-and-help concerns. Social anxiety can also make solitary errands difficult, but usually because those errands involve interactions or exposure to evaluation. Asking what becomes safer when another person comes along often clarifies the function: protection from social interaction, reassurance about symptoms and escape, or both.
What Social Anxiety Disorder is
Social Anxiety Disorder is a recognized anxiety disorder, not a synonym for shyness, introversion, social discomfort, or ordinary nervousness. The clinical pattern includes marked fear or anxiety in social situations involving possible scrutiny, avoidance or intense distress, persistence, disproportionality, and meaningful interference with life. NIMH notes a duration of at least six months for diagnosis and emphasizes effects on work, school, relationships, or other everyday functioning.
Symptoms can include anticipatory anxiety before social situations, self-focused attention during them, post-event review afterward, and safety behaviors intended to prevent humiliation or reveal less anxiety. The NICE social anxiety guideline specifically recommends assessing feared situations, what the person thinks might happen, anxiety symptoms, safety-seeking behaviors, focus of attention, and anticipatory and post-event processing. For a detailed symptom map, see Social Anxiety Symptoms: Fear of Judgment, Avoidance, and Physical Signs.
A person can be highly socially anxious in only some domains. Performance situations, eating or writing while observed, meeting unfamiliar people, dating, speaking to authority figures, or participating in groups can differ sharply in difficulty. What unifies the disorder is not a fixed list of social scenes but persistent fear of scrutiny or negative evaluation across the clinically relevant pattern.
What Agoraphobia is
Agoraphobia is also a recognized anxiety disorder with its own diagnostic territory. In DSM-5-TR-oriented descriptions, fear is associated with multiple kinds of situations in which escape may feel difficult or help may not be readily available if severe symptoms occur. Avoidance can spread from one context to another and may eventually restrict travel, work, shopping, health care, relationships, recreation, and independent movement.
The crucial modern boundary is that agoraphobia is not merely a complication of panic disorder. A major review by Wittchen and colleagues concluded that agoraphobia should be conceptualized as an independent disorder, and current classification reflects that separation. A person may have agoraphobia with panic attacks, with panic disorder, or without recurrent unexpected panic attacks. The English Hub article Agoraphobia Symptoms: Fear, Avoidance, Panic, and Functional Impairment explores that symptom pattern in detail.
Symptoms that overlap
Physical arousal
Both disorders can involve racing heart, sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea, muscle tension, flushing, or feeling mentally overwhelmed. Those sensations can become part of the feared scenario, especially when a person believes others will notice them or believes the sensations signal an impending loss of control. Physical arousal therefore helps describe severity but does not by itself identify which disorder is present.
Anticipatory anxiety and worry
People with either disorder may rehearse a future situation in advance, scan for danger, plan routes or exits, imagine worst-case outcomes, and feel relief when plans are canceled. The content of anticipation is diagnostically more informative than the mere fact that anticipation occurs. Social anxiety tends to forecast negative evaluation; agoraphobia tends to forecast difficulty escaping, obtaining help, or managing severe symptoms in the setting.
Avoidance and restricted life
Both disorders can produce avoidance, and the same outward avoidance may serve different functions. Avoidance can be obvious—never taking a train—or subtle—traveling only at quiet times, sitting beside an exit, ordering food online, speaking only when rehearsed, or going out only with a trusted companion. For the mechanism across anxiety disorders, see Anxiety and Avoidance: How Avoidance Maintains Fear.
Panic attacks do not decide the diagnosis
A panic attack is an acute episode of intense fear or discomfort with a cluster of cognitive and physical symptoms. It can occur in many conditions, including social anxiety disorder, and can occur without panic disorder. In social anxiety disorder, a panic attack may be expected and tightly linked to a feared social or performance situation. That does not automatically convert the diagnosis into panic disorder.
Similarly, agoraphobia does not require panic disorder. The presence of panic symptoms can be important because a person may fear becoming trapped or unable to obtain help during an attack, but the diagnostic question remains whether recurrent unexpected panic attacks and persistent concern or behavioral change establish panic disorder, whether agoraphobic fear meets its own requirements, or whether both are present. The distinction is covered in Panic Disorder vs Agoraphobia: What Is the Difference?.
When panic-like symptoms occur mainly under social scrutiny, compare the broader pattern with Panic Disorder vs Social Anxiety Disorder: Panic Fear vs Social Evaluation Fear. The question is not simply whether panic happens, but whether unexpected panic and fear of future attacks organize the disorder, whether social evaluation does, whether agoraphobic escape-and-help concerns do, or whether more than one pattern independently qualifies.
Avoidance and safety behaviors: same form, different function
Safety behaviors are actions intended to reduce perceived threat while remaining in, approaching, or partially avoiding a feared situation. In social anxiety, examples can include rehearsing every sentence, hiding shaking hands, avoiding eye contact, speaking minimally, checking one's appearance repeatedly, holding a drink tightly to conceal tremor, or staying near a familiar person so less interaction is required. A review by Piccirillo, Dryman, and Heimberg describes safety behaviors as an important maintaining process in social anxiety.
In agoraphobia, safety strategies may include sitting beside exits, carrying medication or water “just in case,” mapping bathrooms, driving only on familiar routes, avoiding bridges or tunnels, staying within a fixed radius of home, checking escape routes, or requiring a companion. These behaviors are not diagnostic by themselves. Their function matters: reducing feared social evaluation, reducing perceived entrapment and lack of help, managing panic-related threat, or serving another purpose.
Treatment research on safety behavior has evolved. A 2016 meta-analysis did not find compelling evidence that simply allowing or removing safety-seeking behavior during exposure determined fear reduction. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of standalone safety-behavior manipulations found that reducing safety behaviors was associated with greater reductions in safety behaviors and symptoms, while increasing them was associated with worse symptom outcomes; the authors also reported moderators and evidence of publication bias. The practical implication is to assess what a safety behavior is doing and target behaviors that maintain threat beliefs, dependence, or avoidance of corrective learning rather than applying a single mechanical rule.
Can a person have both Social Anxiety Disorder and Agoraphobia?
Yes. The two disorders can co-occur, and diagnostic systems do not require choosing one merely because some situations overlap. A person may fear crowded buses because escape feels impossible if dizziness begins and fear workplace meetings because colleagues may judge visible anxiety. They may also fear a crowded reception for both reasons. When each pattern is persistent, disproportionate, distressing or impairing, and meets the remaining requirements, clinicians can diagnose both.
Co-occurrence matters because one label may not explain all avoidance. Treating only social-evaluative beliefs will not necessarily resolve a separate fear of being unable to escape from a highway or train. Conversely, expanding mobility through agoraphobia-focused exposure may leave a distinct fear of speaking, eating, dating, or performing under observation largely unchanged. Comprehensive assessment maps each fear network rather than assuming one disorder owns every symptom.
DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 keep the disorders separate
Social Anxiety Disorder
DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 treat social anxiety disorder as a distinct clinical disorder centered on social scrutiny and evaluation. The precise wording and diagnostic framework differ between classification systems, but both require more than ordinary nervousness. Clinical significance, persistence, context, functional impact, and alternative explanations matter. The WHO ICD-11 Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Requirements provides the current international diagnostic guidance for mental, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia has its own diagnostic requirements and is not classified as “social anxiety in public places.” The feared situations characteristically involve perceived difficulty escaping or obtaining help if severe symptoms occur. The pattern extends across situation categories rather than being defined by one named location. Current classification also allows agoraphobia to be diagnosed independently of panic disorder.
A comparison page cannot diagnose an individual
Diagnostic criteria organize clinical reasoning; they do not turn a checklist, symptom match, or online article into a diagnosis. A qualified clinician integrates history, onset, duration, development, cultural context, impairment, feared outcomes, avoidance, safety behaviors, panic pattern, medical and substance factors, and comorbidity. The English Hub guide How Is Anxiety Diagnosed? Assessment, History, and Differential Diagnosis explains that process.
How clinicians tell social anxiety and agoraphobia apart
1. What exactly is feared?
This is the highest-yield question. Social-anxiety answers typically concern negative evaluation: being seen as awkward, stupid, weak, boring, unattractive, incompetent, or visibly anxious. Agoraphobic answers typically concern being unable to leave, unable to get help, stranded, trapped, or unsafe if intense physical or cognitive symptoms occur. A 1994 differential-diagnosis study by Page found that feared situations, panic symptom patterns, and feared outcomes all helped distinguish panic/agoraphobia presentations from social phobia.
2. Would the situation still be feared if nobody were watching?
This counterfactual is often revealing. If the anxiety falls sharply when social observation disappears, social evaluation may be central. If an empty subway car, tunnel, bridge, wide plaza, or solitary trip still feels dangerous because escape or help seems difficult, agoraphobic concerns may be central. The answer is not a diagnostic test, but it helps expose the function of the fear.
3. Would the situation still be feared if escape were guaranteed?
The reverse question can also help. If being seated directly beside an exit would make a theater manageable, escape availability may be important. If the person remains highly anxious because hundreds of people could see them stand up, blush, speak, eat, or make a mistake, social evaluation may be more central. Many real cases contain both answers.
4. Which situations are feared outside the overlap zone?
The pattern beyond crowds and public places matters. Fear of one-to-one conversations, dating, speaking in meetings, being watched while writing, or eating with others supports a social-evaluative network. Fear of being alone far from home, crossing bridges, driving highways, standing in long lines, or entering spaces where quick exit feels difficult supports an agoraphobic network. Clinicians look for the architecture of fear across contexts.
5. What does a companion change?
A companion can reduce anxiety in both conditions for different reasons. In agoraphobia, the companion may function as a source of help, transport, reassurance, or perceived rescue. In social anxiety, a familiar person may buffer scrutiny, carry conversations, speak to strangers, or reduce the chance of being singled out. Asking what the companion is expected to do can be more informative than noting companionship itself.
6. Are panic attacks expected, unexpected, or absent?
Expected panic in a feared social situation can occur in social anxiety disorder. Panic-like symptoms in an agoraphobic situation can occur without panic disorder. Recurrent unexpected panic attacks with persistent concern or behavior change raise a separate panic-disorder question. The timing, context, and meaning of panic therefore matter more than the mere presence of intense physical symptoms.
Screening can support assessment but cannot make the diagnosis
Validated questionnaires can help quantify symptoms and track change. NICE notes that measures such as the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) and Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) can inform social-anxiety assessment. But a score is not a diagnosis. A clinician must determine whether the full pattern, duration, impairment, exclusions, and differential diagnosis fit.
The same principle applies to agoraphobia screeners or severity measures. A high symptom score may indicate that further assessment is warranted, but it cannot determine why a person avoids a location, whether another disorder better explains the fear, or whether a medical condition is contributing. Screening, symptom severity measurement, clinical assessment, and formal diagnosis are distinct steps.
Important differential diagnoses
Panic Disorder
Panic disorder is organized around recurrent unexpected panic attacks and persistent concern or maladaptive change related to additional attacks. Agoraphobia may co-occur but is separately diagnosed. Social anxiety can include panic attacks without panic disorder. The key is whether unexpected panic and fear of future attacks have their own persistent pattern.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Generalized Anxiety Disorder is organized around excessive, difficult-to-control worry across multiple life domains. A person with GAD may worry about social performance or travel, but broad multi-domain worry remains the central pattern. For direct comparisons, see GAD vs Social Anxiety Disorder: Broad Worry vs Social Evaluation Fear and GAD vs Agoraphobia: Worry vs Situational Fear and Avoidance.
Specific Phobia
Specific phobia centers on marked fear of a specific object or situation. Agoraphobia usually involves a broader pattern across situation categories linked by escape, help, or incapacitation concerns. Social anxiety is linked by social evaluation. A fear of flying, for example, could reflect a focused flight phobia, agoraphobic entrapment concerns, social-evaluative concerns about panicking in front of passengers, or combinations that require assessment.
Avoidant Personality Disorder
Avoidant personality disorder can overlap substantially with social anxiety, particularly when social inhibition and sensitivity to negative evaluation are pervasive. It remains a separate diagnostic construct and should not be treated as a severe subtype of social anxiety by default. Long-term personality pattern, breadth across relationships and self-concept, developmental course, and diagnostic criteria all matter.
Autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions
Social difficulty or avoidance in autism, ADHD, communication differences, or other neurodevelopmental conditions does not automatically indicate social anxiety disorder. Social anxiety can also co-occur with these conditions. Assessment asks whether fear of scrutiny and negative evaluation is present as a distinct anxiety process rather than inferring diagnosis from social behavior alone.
OCD, trauma-related disorders, depression, substances, and medical conditions
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, substance effects, medication effects, vestibular problems, cardiopulmonary conditions, endocrine disorders, and other medical causes can produce avoidance, autonomic arousal, or fear in public settings. These remain separate diagnostic territories. The differential question is not “Which anxiety label resembles the symptom?” but “What process best explains the complete presentation, and what other conditions also need assessment?”
Physical symptoms require medical differential thinking
Rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, dizziness, faintness, nausea, sweating, shaking, visual changes, weakness, and chest discomfort can occur during anxiety, but symptom overlap does not prove an anxiety cause. The American Psychiatric Association notes that evaluation of anxiety symptoms may include ruling out medical conditions. New, severe, atypical, unexplained, or worsening physical symptoms should be assessed on their own medical merits rather than attributed to social anxiety or agoraphobia because the setting feels psychologically plausible.
This is especially important when symptoms involve chest pain, loss of consciousness, severe breathing difficulty, new neurologic signs, or other potentially urgent features. An online social-anxiety-versus-agoraphobia comparison cannot safely distinguish psychiatric from medical causes in those situations. The English Hub article Medical Testing in Anxiety Assessment: What It Can and Cannot Show explains the role and limits of medical evaluation in anxiety assessment.
Why the distinction matters for treatment
Social-anxiety-focused CBT targets social evaluation
NICE recommends individual CBT specifically developed for social anxiety disorder, including Clark and Wells–based or Heimberg-based protocols. Depending on the model, treatment can address self-focused attention, distorted self-images, anticipatory and post-event processing, negative beliefs, safety-seeking behaviors, cognitive restructuring, behavioral experiments, and graduated exposure to feared social situations. That is more specific than telling someone simply to “face crowds.”
A large systematic review and network meta-analysis by Mayo-Wilson and colleagues found strong evidence for individual CBT in adults with social anxiety disorder. A newer 2025 network meta-analysis by Sun and colleagues also found CBT generally among the most effective psychotherapies, while differences among protocols and study quality still matter. See Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment: CBT, Exposure, Medication, and Self-Help for the disorder-specific treatment evidence.
Agoraphobia-focused treatment targets feared places and escape/help predictions
Agoraphobia treatment commonly uses cognitive-behavioral and exposure-based methods directed at avoided contexts, catastrophic predictions, reliance on safety strategies, and confidence in tolerating anxiety and functioning in feared situations. Exposure is not merely enduring distress until it disappears; it is structured learning that can test predictions about danger, escape, coping, and autonomy.
A systematic review and meta-analysis by Breuninger, Tuschen-Caffier, and Svaldi found substantial cognitive improvement during exposure-based treatment for agoraphobia and identified self-efficacy and dysfunctional cognition as plausible mediating processes, while noting limits in causal evidence. For the broader treatment map, see Agoraphobia Treatment: CBT, Exposure Therapy, Medication, and Self-Help.
Interoceptive exposure is not automatically the treatment for every agoraphobic presentation
Interoceptive exposure deliberately evokes feared bodily sensations and is especially relevant when panic sensations and fear of their consequences are important maintaining processes. Because agoraphobia can occur without panic disorder, interoceptive work should not be assumed necessary solely from the agoraphobia label. Treatment formulation should follow the person's actual fear network and comorbid diagnoses.
Medication evidence also has diagnostic boundaries
Medication can be considered in anxiety-disorder treatment, but evidence and guideline recommendations are diagnosis-specific. NICE, for example, provides social-anxiety-specific recommendations for SSRIs when a person chooses pharmacological treatment and includes monitoring and discontinuation considerations. Medication choice depends on diagnosis, comorbidity, contraindications, interactions, adverse-effect risk, prior response, and patient preference. An educational comparison cannot provide an individualized prescription.
What you can notice without self-diagnosing
If you are trying to describe your experience before an assessment, write down concrete situations rather than choosing a label first. For each situation, record what you predict will happen, what you fear other people will think, what you fear your body or mind will do, how difficult escape feels, whether you expect help to be available, whether a companion changes the fear, and what safety behaviors you use.
Also note when the pattern began, how often it occurs, how long it has persisted, what you stopped doing because of it, and whether anxiety appears in situations outside the obvious overlap. Those observations are clinically more useful than asking whether a crowded place “counts” as social anxiety or agoraphobia. They also help separate symptoms from impairment and identify areas that need medical, substance-related, or other psychiatric differential assessment.
When professional assessment is especially useful
Assessment is worth considering when fear or avoidance is persistent, expanding, difficult to manage, or interfering with work, education, relationships, health care, travel, parenting, independence, or valued activities. It is also useful when you cannot tell whether panic, social judgment, escape concerns, trauma, obsessive fears, depression, substance use, medication effects, or a medical condition is driving the pattern.
The aim is not simply to attach a label. A good assessment produces a working map of feared outcomes, maintaining behaviors, comorbidity, medical considerations, and treatment targets. That map can explain why a person who looks “afraid of crowds” may need a social-anxiety formulation, an agoraphobia formulation, both, or something else entirely.
Frequently asked questions
What is the main difference between social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia?
Social anxiety disorder is centered on fear of scrutiny, judgment, embarrassment, humiliation, or rejection. Agoraphobia is centered on fear of situations in which escape may feel difficult or help may seem unavailable if panic-like, incapacitating, or embarrassing symptoms occur. The same place can trigger either disorder for different reasons.
Can you have social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia at the same time?
Yes. The disorders can co-occur. Clinicians assess whether each fear pattern independently meets diagnostic requirements rather than forcing all avoidance into one diagnosis.
Can agoraphobia happen without panic attacks?
Yes. Agoraphobia is a separate diagnosis and does not require panic disorder. A person may fear being unable to escape or obtain help because of other incapacitating or embarrassing symptoms, and agoraphobia can occur without recurrent unexpected panic attacks.
Can social anxiety cause panic attacks?
Panic attacks can occur in social anxiety disorder, especially in feared social or performance situations. A panic attack is an episode and does not by itself establish panic disorder.
Is fear of crowds social anxiety or agoraphobia?
Either is possible. Fear of being watched, judged, embarrassed, or negatively evaluated points toward social anxiety. Fear of being trapped, unable to leave, unable to obtain help, or unsafe if symptoms occur points toward agoraphobia. Assessment focuses on the feared consequence and the broader pattern.
Does avoiding public transportation mean agoraphobia?
No. Public transportation is one agoraphobic situation category, but avoidance alone does not determine a diagnosis. The reason for avoidance, the range of situations, persistence, distress, impairment, and differential diagnosis all matter.
Can an online test tell whether I have social anxiety or agoraphobia?
No. Questionnaires can measure symptoms or support screening, but they do not replace a clinical assessment or establish a formal diagnosis.
Are social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia treated the same way?
They share some treatment principles, including cognitive behavioral and exposure-based methods, but treatment is tailored to the disorder and the person's maintaining processes. Social-anxiety treatment targets social-evaluative beliefs, self-focused attention, safety behaviors, and feared social situations; agoraphobia treatment targets feared places, escape and help concerns, and avoidance, with panic-focused methods added when clinically relevant.