Anxiety management training: A nonspecific behavior therapy program for anxiety control

Abstract

Anxiety management training (AMT) is a conditioning procedure to reduce anxiety reactions. AMT involves the arousal of anxiety and the training of the client to react to the anxiety with relaxation or success feelings. Unlike desensitization, AMT does not use anxiety hierarchies; it is based on the theory that anxiety responses can be discriminative stimuli, and that clients can be conditioned to respond to these cues with responses which remove these stimuli through reciprocal inhibition. Thirteen students were treated for mathematics anxiety by AMT, 11 by desensitization, and compared with 119 untreated, nonanxious control subjects. Results show significant reductions in subjective anxiety for both treatment groups but not for the control group. The AMT group showed higher posttherapy scores on a performance measure involving mathematical computations (the DAT) than the control group; the standard desensitization group showed a significant increment in pre- to posttherapy scores on the same instrument. Although the treatment subjects were not seeking therapy for examination anxiety, self-ratings on test anxiety showed significant decrements following treatment for mathematics anxiety. The study reports on the theoretical foundation for AMT, details the technique, and discusses the value of the approach in comparison with systematic desensitization.