1 / 11

An Investigation of Contextual Stimuli During Treatment with the Explicitly Unpaired Procedure

An Investigation of Contextual Stimuli During Treatment with the Explicitly Unpaired Procedure. Marlo Cutler Baldwin-Wallace College. Human phobias. Human phobias are frequently the result of simple Pavlovian conditioning. Animal (NS)  bark or bite (US)  pain or distress

sylvester-duffy
Télécharger la présentation

An Investigation of Contextual Stimuli During Treatment with the Explicitly Unpaired Procedure

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. An Investigation of Contextual Stimuli During Treatment with the Explicitly Unpaired Procedure Marlo Cutler Baldwin-Wallace College

  2. Human phobias • Human phobias are frequently the result of simple Pavlovian conditioning. • Animal (NS)  bark or bite (US)  pain or distress • Animal (CS)  anticipatory fear (CR)

  3. Fear Conditioning • Conditioned Suppression Procedure (Estes & Skinner, 1941) • NS  no particular response • NS (light) +US (shock)  UR (jump) • CS (light)  CR (anticipatory freezing)

  4. Fear Conditioning Cont. • Traditional extinction of freezing: CS  no US • Freezing decreases over trials. • Problem: there is frequently a relapse of fear outside of the extinction context. • The Explicitly Unpaired Procedure (EU): CS  no US and no CS  US • Research has shown this procedure to prevent the relapse of fear outside of the extinction context. • Why is this the case?

  5. The EU Procedure • Purpose: To assess the importance of contextual conditioning in the EU procedure. • Hypothesis: Exposure to the extinction context will retard context conditioning during the EU procedure and will increase relapse of fear. • Thomas, Longo, & Ayres hypothesis (2004)

  6. Procedure

  7. Training Contexts

  8. Results

  9. Results cont. • Subjects that received exposure to the extinction context as well as those who received exposure to a novel context showed renewal of fear. • All extinction procedures resulted in less freezing during the test than a forgetting control.

  10. Conclusions • The results may indicate that context conditioning is one important element of the EU procedure. • A replication of this study is currently being conducted using contexts that have been made more different and to equate total exposure to the test context.

  11. Implications for therapy • Prolonged exposure to the treatment setting prior to explicitly unpaired training may increase relapse. • Exposure therapies that require the client to face their fear directly are more likely to yield long-term gains than therapies that utilize relaxation or other techniques to minimize the aversiveness of treatment.

More Related