Abstract
The story is told of a renowned behavioral scientist who was running a laboratory containing a number of rats in Skinner boxes. He was obtaining gratifyingly predictable cumulative records of rat behavior — that is, except in the case of one rat. This dissident rat seemed to have no respect for operant conditioning and refused to perform according to theory. After many weeks of work with this rat, students in the laboratory arrived one day to find it missing from his cage. It was never found. No one ever discovered what had happened, although there was a strong suspicion that the behavioral scientist had found the ultimate answer to this discrepant datum. This story is a parable of how scientists can deal with information which is contradictory to their theory. They may ignore, bury or disregard it as unimportant. Within the field of behavior therapy, approaches to anxiety, there is one such nagging discrepancy on which we would like to focus some attention in this paper, in the belief that the discrepancy itself carries the possibility of an advance in our scientific understanding about anxiety. This is the finding that in vivo exposure — that is, making the patient stay in the feared situation — is successful in reducing phobic anxiety.
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© 1985 Plenum Press, New York
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Baker, R., McFadyen, M. (1985). Cognitive Invalidation and the Enigma of Exposure. In: Karas, E. (eds) Current Issues in Clinical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6772-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6772-1_12
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