Psychological Bulletin Publishes Work by Professor Paul Siegel
Inspired by the report, Scientific American delves into the innovative approach of facing fears without even knowing it.
From Spiders to Social Anxiety: Subconscious Exposure Could Calm Your Fears
Professor of Psychology Paul Siegel and his research partner, developmental psychiatrist Bradley S. Peterson of the University of Southern California, published the article “‘All we have to fear is fear itself’: Paradigms for reducing fear by preventing awareness of it” in the September 2024 issue of the highly influential peer-reviewed journal Psychological Bulletin.
Siegel presents considerable evidence attesting to the efficacy of a new generation of therapies for phobias. “Unconscious exposure interventions” repeatedly expose highly phobic persons to their feared stimulus without conscious awareness and thus without causing emotional distress.
This unique feature contrasts with conventional phobia treatments, which require patients to directly confront their fears. The significant distress causes them to frequently drop out of treatment. The unconscious approach prevents highly phobic persons from dropping out of or avoiding treatment altogether.
Purchase students play integral roles in Siegel’s research. Psychology majors and graduates who became research assistants in Siegel’s lab were essential to conducting many of the studies in the Psychological Bulletin article. Several former students were co-authors of these published studies, which helped them gain admission to prestigious graduate schools.
The Psychological Bulletin article caught the attention of Scientific American, which published their own article based on it, “New ‘Unconscious’ Therapies Could Help Treat Phobias” (October 28, 2024). It cites phobia therapy dropout rates as high as 45%.
“‘People miss their exposure therapy appointments more often than they do their dental appointments,’ says psychologist Paul Siegel of Purchase College.
“‘The unconscious exposure paradigm contradicts what’s considered sacred dogma in cognitive behaviorism and clinical psychology,’ Siegel says, ‘which is that if people are going to get over their fears, they have to confront them.’”
This new generation of phobia interventions may have considerable impact on public health because they could be widely disseminated online. Siegel has been studying his intervention, “very brief exposure” or VBE, for 19 years.
“‘To determine if VBE is effective in my lab, we don’t kid around,’ Siegel says. ‘We put them in a room with a live tarantula and see how much closer they can get to it.’”
He and his colleagues have repeatedly found that VBE causes phobic participants to move significantly closer to the tarantula and reduces the fear they report while doing so. One follow-up assessment found that this fear-reducing effect was maintained one year later.
Read the complete article in Scientific American.
Siegel and Peterson recently received a significant research grant ($484,000) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop a new treatment for Social Anxiety Disorder.