Study: verbally acknowledging fear helps dissipate it (Wired UK)
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Battling fear ()
Study: verbally acknowledging fear helps
dissipate it
By Liat Clark (/search/author/Liat+Clark)
05 September 12 (Wed, 05 Sep 2012 12:30:00 +01:00)
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battling fear range from shaping that behaviour through positive
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Regulating emotions through positive verbal reinforcement is also a popular
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However, a UCLA team of psychologists has decided to try a new tact -looking that spider in the eye (all eight of them) and telling it just how terrified
of it you are. Naming an emotion, the team suggests, is the way to set
yourself free of being bound to it.
"This is unique because it differs from typical procedures in which the goal is
to have people think differently about the experience -- to change their
emotional experience or change the way they think about it so that it doesn't
make them anxious," said Michelle Craske, a co-author on the paper, published
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Page 1 of 5
Study: verbally acknowledging fear helps dissipate it (Wired UK)
(http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/08/16/0956797612443830.abstract)
in the journal Psychological Science. "Here, there was no attempt to change
their experience, just to state what they were experiencing."
The study describes how 88 arachnophobes were split into four groups -- their
first task, to touch a live tarantula in an open container outdoors. After being
asked to get as close to it as they could and having their responses and
reactions (such as anxiety-induced sweaty palms) monitored, the four groups
were then taken inside for phase two. Here, the first group was asked to
describe what they were feeling in detail, for example, "I'm anxious and
frightened by the ugly, terrifying spider". The second group was asked to
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make a more neutral statement aimed at diffusing the experience, such as is
used in standard fear therapies: "That little spider can't hurt me; I'm not afraid
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of it". The third group was asked to say something totally irrelevant to the
experience while the fourth said nothing.
A week later, all the groups returned to face-off with the tarantula again. This
time around, the first group did far better, getting closest to the tarantula and
experiencing the least sweaty palms. Individuals that had used the most
negative terms when describing their experience got the closest and exhibited
the fewest physiological expressions of anxiety -- the study therefore
concluded that the more emotionally-fuelled the terms, the better the chances
of combatting the fear.
"The differences were significant," said Craske. "The results are even more
significant given the limited amount of time involved -- with a fuller treatment,
the effects may be even larger."
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The results of the study actually counteract popular belief, which explains why
real-world studies of the theory have never been done before. In previous
trials, the UCLA team had asked people what would make them feel worse,
looking at a disturbing image or looking at it while describing it with negative
words. Nearly every candidate opted for the latter, suggesting fear holds
people back from verbalising their emotions.
"People think that makes our negative emotions more intense," explained
Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA psychology professor involved in the study. "Well,
that is exactly what we asked people to do here. In fact, it's a little better to
have people label their emotions -- our intuitions here are wrong."
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Lieberman said that although exposure obviously has hugely positive benefits
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when it comes to battling fear, it is not understood why acknowledging that
(/magazine/archive/2012/10/features/im-in-ur-
fear helps dissipate it.
internets-kontrolin-ur-mindz)
"When spider-phobics say, 'I'm terrified of that nasty spider,' they're not
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learning something new; that's exactly what they were feeling -- but now
instead of just feeling it, they're saying it. For some reason that we don't fully
understand, that transition is enough to make a difference."
Studies have shown that people's ability to label and regulate emotions and
the emotional reactions themselves are all dictated by the brain's right
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventromedial_prefrontal_cortex). It's not
understood, however, what its role is in making an active link between a
particular feeling that has been verbally stated and the emotional and physical
reaction to that feeling.
The team hopes the findings will be beneficial to victims of abuse and soldiers
suffering from post-traumatic stress, with Lieberman saying definitively, "I'm a
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believer that this approach can have real benefits for people". The method is
not so dissimilar from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a cognitivebehavioural approach that encourages individuals to be honest about their
feelings. With the UCLA study, however, the team has shown that direct
acknowledgement and careful honest labelling can yield dramatically better
results.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/05/battling-fear
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Study: verbally acknowledging fear helps dissipate it (Wired UK)
9/11/12 1:18 PM
Image: Tarantula (http://www.flickr.com/photos/eggybird/110697230/) /
Eggybird (http://www.flickr.com/photos/eggybird/) / CC BY 2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
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