Timing of Extinction Reminders

Many evidence-based psychotherapies are organized around basic principles of learning. Exposure therapies, for example, are gold standard interventions for anxiety disorders such as PTSD, social phobia, and OCD. In these therapies, patients learn to approach things that elicit fear (but are actually safe) and avoidance in a safe and structured way. The anxiety response extinguishes, so that the patient no longer has false fear alarms go off when they encounter these things in the future. Although this process works well for many people, sometimes it is difficult to take what is learned in exposure therapy inside the clinic and generalize it to real-world situations. In the present study, we are testing the effects on learning when a novel reminder is used at different points during extinction training. Results from this study will inform the development of future treatments using reminders of learning from inside the clinic setting to directly change how people change their behavior outside the clinic setting.

 Powered by Drupal .:. Site design by durhamdbt.com