ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a variety of conditioning phenomena, studied mostly in animals, that bear on issues relating to the etiology, maintenance, and therapy of the three primary anxiety-based disorders—phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and generalized anxiety states, in that order. The idea of using counterconditioning techniques to extinguish fears has as long a history as conditioning models of phobias themselves, but it was not until Wolpe’s reciprocal inhibition therapy developed in the 1950s that such ideas became popular in the treatment of phobias. As an understanding of how flooding of avoidance responses may produce its effects becomes increasingly complex, a parallel phenomenon has occurred in the human literature on the flooding of phobias. Thus, in spite of the sometimes misleading parallels that have been drawn between conditioned avoidance responses and phobias, the model for therapy has proved to be a very fruitful one.
