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Eventually the cats lost their fear of the box entirely. Wolpe replicated Masserman's work, showing that cats would lose their fear of a box where they had been shocked, if he fed them first at a distance, then closer to the box where previously they were shocked. Whatever it is called, the procedure works. Wolpe felt the responses of anxiety and eating inhibited or prevented each other. At first, before discovering the work of Pavlov's student, Wolpe called the pattern reciprocal inhibition. In counterconditioning, a conditional response is eliminated by replacing it with another, incompatible response.
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That phenomenon was discovered by one of Pavlov's students in 1912 (Wolpe and Plaud, 1997). Now the sight of the box predicted food instead of a shock, so the anxiety disappeared. A CER was established, as the sight of the box provoked anxiety.īy feeding the cat in the box, Masserman counteracted the conditional emotional response (CER). Shocking the cats in the box created an association between that location (or the act of being put in the box) and a painful aftereffect. Wolpe saw the same events as conditioning. He interpreted this in psychodynamic terms, as "breaking through the motivational conflict." Masserman observed that the cats lost their "neurosis" if they were fed in the box. Soon the cats acted anxious when put in the box. Wolpe's inspiration came from experiments by Masserman (1943) who made cats "neurotic" by giving them electric shocks in a box. Desensitization was the first widely-adopted therapy based on a behavioral principles, so Wolpe became known as the father of behavior therapy. It was self-consciously designed using insights from laboratory work on conditioning, and it focused directly on problem behavior rather than trying to treat an underlying mental illness.ĭesensitization was proposed by the South African psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe (pronounced VOLE-py). Next page Desensitization and Exposure Therapiesĭesensitization was the first therapy to be called a behavior therapy.