Exposure therapy is a psychological treatment that was developed to help people confront their fears. When people are fearful of something, they tend to avoid the feared objects, activities or situations.

Exposure therapy is thought to help in several ways, including: • Habituation: Over time, people find that their reactions to feared objects or situations decrease. • Extinction: Exposure can help weaken previously-learned associations between feared …

This chapter presents an overview of the latest experimental findings regarding extinction as a mechanism of exposure therapy in human phobic samples.

In this paper we will refer to all these therapy programs collectively as exposure. Exposure methods share the common feature of helping anxious patients confront their fear-evoking stimuli with the aim of reducing the irrational fear or anxiety.

We have organized this chapter around a series of key questions to address the nature, clinical application, efficacy and effectiveness, and change mechanisms of exposure therapy.

The aim of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of exposure therapy in the routine treatment of health anxiety patients. Method Data were available for 35 patients, who repeatedly filled in comprehensive general questionnaires, and those specific to health anxiety.

Exposure therapy is the most effective psychological treatment for anxiety. While a number of books describe how to implement exposure techniques for specific anxiety disorders, this is the first volume to provide a comprehensive framework for treating clients suffering from any type of pathological worry or fear.

We review in this chapter the basic learning research that led to the application of exposure therapy to pathological anxiety as well as the history of exposure in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

This chapter reviews the history and underlying theory of exposure therapy and provides a description of primary procedures in exposure. The chapter summarizes the outcome data associated with the approach and highlights the mechanisms of change.

We highlight key negative beliefs and attitudes about exposure therapy that are important for supervisors to address with trainees and provide recommendations for how supervisors can identify and address such beliefs in their trainees.