Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Jun 2016
The impact of a context switch and context instructions on the return of verbally conditioned fear.
Repeated exposure to a conditioned stimulus can lead to a reduction of conditioned fear responses towards this stimulus (i.e., extinction). However, this reduction is often fragile and sensitive to contextual changes. In the current study, we investigated whether extinction of fear responses established through verbal threat instructions is also sensitive to contextual changes. We additionally examined whether verbal instructions can strengthen the effects of a context change. ⋯ Contextual cues can impact the return of fear established via verbal instructions. Verbal instructions can further strengthen the contextual control of fear.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2016
ReviewWhat does the facial dot-probe task tell us about attentional processes in social anxiety? A systematic review.
Current models of SAD assume that attentional processes play a pivotal role in the etiology and maintenance of social anxiety disorder. Social anxiety is supposedly associated with an attentional bias towards disorder related stimuli such as threatening faces. Using the facial dot probe task in socially anxious individuals has, however, revealed inconsistent findings. ⋯ Methodologically, combined measures of dot-probe and eye movement measures might be beneficial to detect overt attentional biases. Importantly, our results show that preferential processing of threat cues might guide early attentional processes in social anxiety, depending however on several contextual and situational factors. Clinically, patients with greater severity of SAD may be more prone to such an attentional bias, thus therapists should take this into account when planning behavioral experiments and exposure therapy.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2016
Learned, instructed and observed pathways to fear and avoidance.
Conditioned fear may emerge in the absence of directly experienced conditioned stimulus (CS)--unconditioned stimulus (US) pairings. Here, we compared three pathways by which avoidance of the US may be acquired both directly (i.e., through trial-and-error instrumental learning) and indirectly (i.e., via verbal instructions and social observation). ⋯ Instrumental-, instructed-, and observational-learning pathways of avoidance are similar. Findings may have implications for understanding the etiology of clinical avoidance in anxiety.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Sep 2015
Barking up the wrong tree in attentional bias modification? Comparing the sensitivity of four tasks to attentional biases.
Attentional bias modification (ABM) is a potentially exciting new development in the treatment of anxiety disorders. However, reported therapeutic benefits have not always been replicated. To gauge the sensitivity of tasks used in ABM treatment and assessment, we used a counterbalanced within-subject design to measure their discriminant sensitivity to neutral and threatening facial expressions, comparing them with other well-known tasks that measure visual attention. ⋯ Our results indicate that the sensitivity of putative attentional bias measures should be assessed experimentally for more powerful assessment and treatment of such biases. If the attentional blink task is indeed particularly sensitive to attentional biases, as our findings indicate, it is not unreasonable to expect that interventions based on this task may be more effective than those based on the tasks that are currently used.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Jun 2015
Randomized Controlled TrialSymbolic online exposure for spider fear: habituation of fear, disgust and physiological arousal and predictors of symptom improvement.
This research compared the effects of real versus hyper-real images on anxiety, disgust, and physiological arousal during internet-delivered exposure in high spider-fearfuls. Hyper-real images were digitally altered to highlight fearful aspects. A further aim was to examine self-reported and behavioural therapeutic outcomes and exposure-related predictors of these outcomes. ⋯ Findings provide evidence in support of the efficacy of online image-based exposure and have implications for informing further research into the underlying mechanisms of image-based exposure treatment.