The utility of presenting slides of a phobic stimulus in the context of a behavioral avoidance procedure

Abstract

The study reported involves a comparison between in vivo and slide presentations of a phobic object. Female college students (N=82) who reported fear of rats were tested using a behavioral avoidance procedure. Subjects were divided into three groups. Subjects in an in vivo condition were instructed to bring a live rat increasingly closer by pressing a button on the test apparatus. Subjects in two slide conditions followed a similar procedure with a button press bringing the slide of a rat in clearer view. Behavioral, self-ratings, and psychophysiological measures were obtained. Subjects were classified as no-touch (NT) or touch (T) on the basis of a contact test which took place at the end of the experiment. The in vivo condition, as expected, produced in the NT subjects a reliably greater fear reaction when compared to T subjects and to the slide conditions. However, one of the slide conditions was also found to reliably discriminate behaviorally between NT and T subjects. This latter finding suggests the potential usage of slide material to discriminate at a clinical level other feared stimuli for which an in vivo phobic stimulus would be difficult or impossible to present. Other findings with implications for assessment of phobic behavior are reported.