Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bagley, Louella R.
• Bandarian-Balooch, Siavash

Titel

Attenuation of renewal of fear using context similarity with spider fearful individuals

Ist Teil von

• Learning and motivation, 2020-05, Vol.70, p.101630, Article 101630

Ort / Verlag

Philadelphia: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Presently relapse rates occurring post exposure therapy are over 60 %.•Single-session exposure was conducted with live spiders as stimuli.•Results showed that single-session, in-vivo exposure was effective in reducing fear of spiders.•The use of similar contexts between exposure and follow-up successfully reduce renewal.•This research aimed to further the research on effective and robust treatments for clinical phobias. The fact that renewal of fear can be due to a contextual mismatch between the exposure treatment context and the context where subsequent re-encountering occurs suggests that exposure does not completely remove the underlying fear associations. Conducting exposure in a context that is similar to the re-encounter context may be an effective method of attenuating renewal of fear. The current study examined the effects of context similarity using a single session in-vivo exposure in a sample of 61 moderate to high spider fearful first year psychology students at Griffith University (mean age was 25.36 years). Participants received standardised, in-vivo exposure with a golden orb spider. Fear was measured using self-report, behavioural avoidance, and heart rate measures. Four different contexts were utilised for this study with two being located indoors and two located outdoors. Self-reported fear ratings and heart rate showed that conducting exposure in contexts that are similar to subsequent re-encounter contexts attenuated renewal. This study shows how a simple modification to the exposure process can enhance the long-term cross contextual generalizability of exposure treatment in spider fearful individuals.