Study: verbally acknowledging fear helps dissipate it

According to a study published by a team of psychologists,
telling a spider you are frightened of its ugly and terrifying self
is the path to setting yourself free from a fear of arachnids.

Methods of modifying human behaviour when it comes to battling
fear range from shaping that behaviour through positive
reinforcement or acclimatising an individual to a feared object
through
systematic desensitisation
. Regulating emotions through
positive verbal reinforcement is also a popular practice -- for
instance, encouraging those afraid of spiders to approach the
arachnid in question while repeating the words "that spider can't
hurt me and I'm not afraid of it".

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
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 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 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."

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."

Lieberman said that although exposure obviously has hugely
positive benefits when it comes to battling fear, it is not
understood why acknowledging that fear helps dissipate it.

"When spider-phobics say, 'I'm terrified of that nasty spider,'
they're not 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
. 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 believer that this approach
can have real benefits for people". The method is not so dissimilar
from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a cognitive-behavioural
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.

Image: Tarantula
/ Eggybird / CC
BY 2.0

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