The aim of this paper is to discuss the original research, which the authors conduced and described in a psychology journal. The article, which has been chosen for this purpose, was published in the Volume #3 of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1969 ((Bandura, Blanchard, & Ritter, 1969).
1. Nature of the study.
The modification of human behavior has been of a great scientific interest through years. Constant growth of new treatment approaches has stimulated the authors of the discussed research to assess the differential efficacy of several new treatment approaches for inducing various kinds of changes in phobic subjects and to investigate particular issues, which have influence the changing process.
2. Hypotheses. Snake-phobic subjects had been exposed to one of the treatmentы from the list: systematic desensitization, symbolic modeling treatment, live modeling with contact desensitization treatment, or they did not receive any intervening treatment. It was predicted that all the three treatment approaches would extinguish both avoidance behavior and fear arousal, with the notice of live modeling combined with guided participation to be superior in the experiment outcomes.
3. Sample population. The study based on a behavioral avoidance test involved 48 volunteers in total, with 5 males and 43 females, aged from 13 to 59.
4. Research method. The research method can be divided into the following stages:
A. Preliminary assessment with a questionnaire completion. The subjects were asked to describe their fear experience connected with snake encounters. This was made to be able to note any familiar modeling of snake phobic behavior.
B. The measurement of subjects’ attitude towards snakes before treatment. This measurement was done in two ways: rating the encounter with a snake on a 7-point scale and using the eight bipolar adjectives to describe the subject’s attitude towards snakes.
C. The test of behavior avoidance included performance of threatening tasks with a king snake (approaching the snake, touching it, etc.). The subject’s results in this test depended on the number of tasks he or she successfully performed.
D. Fear detection with further approach responses. This stage was specially designed to assess the fear intensity, which people were exposed to during the experiment.
E. Fear proneness estimation. The list that had to be tested consisted of 100 items, which provided the subjects with fears from many life categories: wildlife, social life, physical pain, some kinds of phobias and compounded fears. All the above-mentioned things were rated by the subject on a 5-point emotional scale, from the least to the most fear-provoking issues.
F. Treatment conditions. All kinds of treatments were conducted individually (according to every person’s pretreatment avoidance behavior) and were assigned randomly to one of four conditions.
G. After-treatment evaluation. After having conducted the series of various treatments, the researchers examined the interaction between attitudinal and behavioral changes.
5. Research findings. The results of the experiment proved the fact that social based treatment approaches can be of a high efficiency in producing generalized and prolonging psychological changes. Of all the three treatment methods, modeling combined with guided participation was regarded as the most successful one in the terms of avoiding phobic behavior as well as fear awakening. In addition, those people who partially achieved success in the research demonstrated essential changes after the short contact desensitization period. The findings of the conducted research also showed that contrary to psychodynamic theory expectations, the extinction of emotional responses to a fear-awakening object resulted in significant reductions of anxiety.
6. Results application. Substantial reorganization of fear attitudes still needs to be further researched. The research results may still be of great help for those people, whose professions are connected with facing threats for their life and health every day. By applying the research findings, people will be able to better understand the nature of anxiety and therefore better control themselves while facing all kinds of fear.
References
Bandura, A., Blanchard, E., & Ritter, B. (1969). Relative efficacy of desensitization and modeling approaches for inducing behavioral, affective, and attitudinal changes. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 13(3), 173-199. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0028276
