Do avoidance tendencies influence the effects of counterconditioning in anxiety?
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2021-07-03
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en
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Abstract
Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent mental disorders worldwide. Too many patients do
not profit sufficiently from the current evidence based treatment (exposure) or suffer from re
lapse. One possible reason is the lack of valence enhancement in exposure whilst valence en
hancement is observable after counterconditioning. One important predictor of treatment suc
cess of exposure are pre-treatment behavioural avoidance tendencies. This study is set up to
investigate if the effects of counterconditioning are sensitive to those tendencies.
Healthy participants were tested online. They were asked to complete a fearful avoidance task
(FAT) in order to induce fear through unpleasant auditive stimuli, receive counterconditioning
training and then do the FAT again. In the counterconditioning training one threat-stimulus was
exposed regularly and the counterconditioning stimulus is combined with a auditive and visual
reinforcer of choice. Participants also were asked to rate the valence of the different threat stim
uli.
The counterconditioning-manipulation applied in this study did not result in a significant avoid
ance reduction. However, the valence of the threat stimulus did improve significantly only in
the counterconditioning condition, as expected. The hypotheses cannot be confirmed because
the pre-treatment avoidance tendencies did neither predict the amount of valence enhancement
nor the percentual avoidance reduction.
There seems to be a lot to gain in applying counterconditioning regarding improvement of the
perceived valence of a threat stimulus compared to exposure. In this study no evidence can be
found for the hypothesis that this outcome might be affected by a person’s pre-treatment avoid
ance tendencies.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen