Systematic desensitization and exposure are widely used techniques in psychology and are often very useful for a person to come into contact with a stimulus that is scary or causes anxiety, thus reducing their reaction.
Therefore, they can be very useful techniques for treating anxiety disorders (they work especially well in phobias), mood disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
- These are two very versatile techniques.
- Because anxiety is a constant emotion in any mental disorder.
- However.
- The limitations presented by one of them can be covered by the other.
- Such as the problem of abandonment or refusal to be exposed by exposure with response prevention.
Therefore, these are important techniques to eliminate fear through fear itself.
Systematic desensitization (DS) and exposure are designed to stop fearing stimuli such as public speaking, being afraid of snakes or fear of the future, they want this stimulus to no longer be dangerous to the person.
Systematic desensitization aims to create an association between the stimuli that previously provoked an anxiety response and the responses of the person who are incompatible with that anxiety, so it seeks to achieve a counterhaul, breaking the link with the stimulus.
Exposure, or exposure with response prevention (PRT), is intended to prevent the person from avoiding or escaping from the face to phobia or anxiety stimuli, so that behaviors that function as safety behaviors disappear, thus preventing maintaining the anguish presented that eventually disappears.
It is quite common to think that the big difference between systematic desensitization and response prevention exposure lies in the way both are applied, but there are other differences.
In the SD, as we said above, a counterhaul process is sought, including relaxation techniques, if the person shows anxiety to a stimulus, tries to stop and relax and then reintroduce the stimulus. , are the processes inherent in techniques not the same?Is DS an exhibition with relaxation techniques?
What we do know is that the difference between the two techniques lies in the learning process. In the case of SD, as mentioned above, there is a counter conditioning process; EPR, a process of extinction.
Van Egeren (1970) presents four phenomena due to two dimensions: reciprocal and short-term or long-term inhibition.
In all four modalities there is a decrease in anxiety levels due to anxiety stimulus, but the learning processes inherent in the four modalities are different, in fact, in two of them there are learning processes (long term) while in the other two, there are psychophysiological processes (short-term).
Mutual inhibition refers to the use of an element incompatible with the feeling of anxiety, for example, a relaxation or controlled breathing technique, which appears in SD, but not in EPR.
Therefore, Van Egeren argued that stimuli may no longer be anxiety inducers or fluoric through processes of:
Some people distinguish between systematic desensitization and exposure by arguing that the former is Pavlovian and the second is operational.
When we say that it is Pavlovian, we say that the SD deals with conditioned stimuli, an example of conditioned stimulus (EC) could be a car, being the conditioned response (RC) anxiety in the face of a possible accident, in this case there is no effort or punishment to maintain the behavior.
However, PRT can address pavlovian stimuli, not just operators, it is useful for operators because EPR prevents any behavior of the person who reinforces anxiety.
For example, when a person with a bus phobia avoids this mode of transport, the anxiety generated by the bus is reinforced. In PRT, it is usually sought to ensure that the person does not escape or avoid the bus; the goal is for her to take the bus, not reinforce the opposite behavior.
Exposure, however, may require EC and RC. In the example above, it is possible to expose a person to a car, without any inhibition or mutual relaxation, to show that the accident will not occur.
PRT is used in several anxiety disorders. Today, it is the most commonly used behavioral intervention to treat obsessions and compulsions related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, and has also been used in specific phobias, such as agoraphobia and social phobia.
SD, for its part, has been used to treat phobias or disorders in which anxiety is an important element, such as eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, insomnia, alcoholism, etc. It is also recommended to reduce the fear and tension that some feel. asthma patients at the time of seizure.
SD is also useful when exposure or RPE is problematic: a man whose anxiety levels prevent him from reaching exposure (in which case relaxation techniques may be appropriate), or exposures that are difficult to apply, such as in a phobia of Flying on an airplane.
Some authors, on the other hand, understand that systematic desensitization also exhibits extinction processes, not counter conditioning, and suggest that any technique that leads subjects to be exposed to feared stimuli in the absence of adverse consequences would be as effective as an SD. in eliminating fear reactions.