This week Dr Eleanor Leigh talks about how, for some adolescents, social situations create such feelings of anxiety that it interfere with learning and education as well as other aspects of their day to day lives. Eleanor is principal Clinical Psychologist and the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow at the department of experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. Her research is focused on social anxiety in adolescents. Social anxiety disorder is a common and disabling mental health condition that usually starts in adolescence and persists in the absence of treatment. Using experimental methods, her work aims to improve our understanding of the psychological processes that maintain social anxiety in adolescents in order to inform cognitive approaches to treatment.