Back to Search
Start Over
Exposure to the context and removing the unpredictability of the US: two methods to reduce contextual anxiety compared
- Source :
- Biological Psychology, 85(3), 361-369. Elsevier
- Publication Year :
- 2010
- Publisher :
- Elsevier, 2010.
-
Abstract
- Chronic anxiety may differ from cued fear and hence require other treatment strategies. In a human fear conditioning paradigm, chronic anxiety to the experimental context was experimentally induced by presenting unpredictable shocks. Two methods to reduce chronic anxiety were tested and compared. First, in parallel with the standard extinction procedure, participants were exposed to the anxiety-eliciting context in the absence of shocks (context-exposure group). Second, an alternative procedure was tested in which the previously unpredictable shocks were now signaled by a specific cue (signaled group). A control group continued to receive unsignaled shocks. Results indicated that chronic contextual anxiety, as measured by fear-potentiated startle and US-expectancy ratings, was equally reduced in the context-exposure group as in the signaled group compared with the control group. When applied to the treatment of, for example, panic disorder, these findings support the idea that exposure to the context in which the unpredictable panic attacks occurred and making unpredictable panic attacks predictable, are both valuable methods in order to reduce chronic anxiety.
- Subjects :
- Male
Reflex, Startle
Adolescent
Conditioning, Classical
Context (language use)
Anxiety
Online Systems
Developmental psychology
Young Adult
Predictive Value of Tests
Avoidance Learning
medicine
Humans
Fear conditioning
Analysis of Variance
Electroshock
Electromyography
General Neuroscience
Panic disorder
Panic
Extinction (psychology)
medicine.disease
Startle reaction
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Psychophysiology
Female
Cues
medicine.symptom
Psychology
Photic Stimulation
Clinical psychology
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 03010511
- Volume :
- 85
- Issue :
- 3
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Biological Psychology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....d4711f3993b2366d4b8771a8d1b0db78