Phobias develop through learning processes, so they can also be unlearned. Psychologists in Bochum use various interventions to help sufferers overcome their fears.

Bochum, November 12, 2024 – If you’re afraid of spiders, you’re in good company: arachnophobia is one of the most common phobias. The proven most successful remedy for this is exposure therapy: you expose yourself to the fear-inducing stimulus and experience a kind of disappointment. What happens is not what you feared. This breaks the link between stimulus and fear – at least for most people. As it doesn’t work for everyone and the fear sometimes returns, researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum want to improve the therapy with targeted strategies. Rubin, the science magazine of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, reports on this.

Utilising self-efficacy

‘We want to better understand which learning mechanisms underlie these anxiety disorders and find out whether there are additional strategies that support the effectiveness and sustainability of the therapy,’ says Prof. Dr Armin Zlomuzica from the Research and Treatment Centre for Mental Health at Ruhr-Universität. In order to make the therapy more successful and sustainable, the researchers in the Collaborative Research Centre Extinction Learning are investigating the effects of various accompanying measures. One starting point for this is self-efficacy.
The trick: If the anxiety patients have experienced during therapy that they have survived the confrontation with the spider or the height without anything bad happening, their expectations are violated and they have learnt that they can endure the situation. After all, they had seen the catastrophe coming. If the therapy team reinforces this unexpected experience of self-efficacy, promotes and activates the good feeling of having overcome the situation on their own, the patients perform better in a renewed confrontation with the fear-inducing stimulus than without this activation of self-efficacy.

Influencing cognitive processes

Other strategies also focus on influencing cognitive processes in order to improve the unlearning of anxiety. Prof Dr Marcella Woud, who moved from Ruhr University Bochum to Georg August University Göttingen in autumn 2023 as Head of the Department of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology, worked in a study with 80 patients who suffered from a fear of heights. In order to consolidate the experience from the exposure therapy, the researchers used what is known as Cognitive Bias Modification – Interpretation Training with half of the participants. This is a computer-based training programme in which the participants positively complete ambiguous sentences related to the altitude situation, thereby resolving their ambivalence and leading the described situation to a positive outcome.

Detailed article in the science magazine Rubin

The results of the study can be found in the detailed article on the topic in the special edition of the science magazine Rubin on the subject of extinction learning https://news.rub.de/wissenschaft/psychotherapie-der-angst-ins-auge-blicken. The texts on the website may be used free of charge for editorial purposes, provided that the source ‘Rubin – Ruhr-Universität Bochum’ and images from the download area are cited and the terms of use are observed.

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