ABSTRACT
The research on learning by imitation in humans includes a large number of publications. Imitation methods are also used in dancing lessons and “etiquette” behavior learning. Learning by copying parents’ or other adults’ actions by a child is well known to occur both at school and at home. Several observations showed that modeling appeared helpful in reducing various fears in children, such as dental and animal phobias, fear of darkness, fear of water, and other phobias. L.G. Ost described the one-session treatment of twenty female patients suffering from various kinds of “specific phobias” such as injection, spider, rat, cat, bird and dog. Other animal phobias also showed great improvement, on average a 65 percent reduction. The patients were then periodically tested for the maintenance of the therapy effects for a mean follow-up period of 4 years.
