Stimulus modality and aerophobia: cautions for desensitization therapy.

Abstract

The succem of desensitization therapy depends, to a crucial degree, upon isolation of the critical anxiety-provoking cues. This poses no serious problem for most phobias, where exteroceptive stimuli serve to evoke anxiety. In some instances, however, eliciting stimuli may prove considerably more subtle. Razran, for example (1961), reports data in which the conditional stimuli, responses, or both, comprise interoceptive events ; this conditioning, although slower to obtain, was less readily extinguished or reversed than the usual form. Further, if such stimuli elicited phobic avoidance, it should prove more difficult for a patient to isolate them in reporting his complaints, or to simulate them in graduated degree by imagination, than with phobic response to exteroceptive cues. This paper presents a case of aerophobia treated by reciprocal inhibition with results that call attention to hazards in planning treatment when, to an appreciable degree, anxiety is attached to interoceptive stimuli. CASE STUDY