Disentangling the Effects of Safety-Behavior Utilization and Safety-Behavior Availability During Exposure-Based Treatment: A Placebo-Controlled Trial.

Abstract

The primary aim of the current study was to further investigate the deleterious effects of safety-seeking behaviors on fear reduction by disentangling the effects of perceived availability of threat-relevant safety behaviors during treatment versus their actual use. Participants (N=72) displaying marked claustrophobic fear were randomly assigned to 1 of 5 conditions: (a) exposure only (EO), (b) exposure with phobic safety-behavior availability (SBA), (c) exposure with safety-behavior utilization (SBU), (d) credible placebo treatment (PL), or (e) wait list (WL). High end-state functioning rates at posttreatment were as follows: EO = 94%, SBA = 45%, SBU = 44%, PL = 25%, and WL = 0%. Findings suggest that it is the perception of the availability of safety aids as opposed to their actual use that exerts a disruptive effect on fear reduction. Clinical implications are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 181 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.