A standardized desensitization program applicable to group and individual treatments

Effects of false feedback on avoidance behavior: "Cognitive" desensitization revisited.

“…Group 5 was a no-treatment group which served as a control for any reduction in fear in the absence of intervening treatment. Session 1 for -Groups 1-4 consisted of training in deep muscle relaxation from a 30-minute tape recording used by Nawas et al (1970), which was adapted from Jacobson (1938). All subjects were instructed to practice these relaxation exercises once a day.…”

“…In order to assess expectation of beneficial outcome following the experimental instructions, subjects in both groups were asked to rate on a 7-point scale (a) how effective they expected the therapy proce-dure would be for them and (6) how capable they considered the experimenter would be in executing the experiment. For the remainder of the session, these subjects were administered the standardized systematic desensitization program described by Nawas et al (1970) in which they were systematically exposed to slides corresponding closely to the 20 steps of the behavioral avoidance test. The frequency and duration of individual slide presentations were predetermined, unlike the orthodox desensitization procedure in which the subject controls the rate of progress through the hierarchy (Wolpe, 1958).…”

“…The present study investigated the effects of self-perceived progress up the hierarchy in a design which eliminated the confounding in Brown's experiment by using the standardized desensitization program described by Nawas, Fishman, and Pucel (1970). An additional aim was to provide a more adequate experimental test of Marcia et al's (1969) expectancy change theory by eliminating the specific methodological flaws in their study in the manner described below.…”

Aspects of behaviour therapy 1969–70

“…Turning to the other two stages of SD, namely hierarchy construction, and desensitization itself, it appears that a great deal more freedom in procedures is possible than Wolpe thought. There are now many studies which fairly convincingly allow the following statements to be made: group SD is as effective as individual SD (e.g., Ihli and Garlington, 1969;Mann and Rosenthal, 1969); SD may be accelerated and massed rather than taken slowly and spaced out (e.g., Suinn, Edie, and Spinelli, 1970;Suinn and Hall, 1970); the anxiety-hierarchy may be proceeded through at random with respect to anxiety-arousing properties of stimuli (e.g., Miller and Nawas, 1970); and standard hierarchies (Ihli and Garlington, 1969) and even standardized SD programmes as a whole are feasible (e.g., Nawas, Fishman, and Pucel, 1970). There are persistent suggestions that SD(R) may be superior to SD(1) (e.g., Barlow, Leitenberg, Agras, and Wincze, 1969) and at last some empirical evidence is available that SD may generalize from the laboratory to real-life (e.g., Cotler and Garlington, 1969;Ihli and Garlington, 1969).…”

Relaxation and distraction in experimental desensitization

“…Attentional analyses of desensitization therapy suggest that relaxation functions as either a distractor that "shuts out" fear (Nawas, Fishman, & Pucel, 1970) or as an activity that allows attention to be switched away from the fearful stimuli (Wilkins, 1971). maintain that the attention required to focus on rclaxing shuts out the development of fear by reducing attention to the fearevoking elements of the stimulus situation.…”