Advancing the treatment of anxiety disorders in transition-age youth: a review of the therapeutic effects of unconscious exposure.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The real-world effectiveness of exposure-based therapies for youth depends on the willingness and ability of young people to tolerate confronting their fears, which can be experienced as highly aversive and create problems with treatment engagement and acceptance. Recently, neuroscientific research on the nonconscious basis of fear has been translated into novel exposure interventions that bypass conscious processing of feared stimuli and that thus do not cause phobic youth to experience distress. We present a review of these unconscious exposure interventions.

Methods

A PRISMA-based search yielded 20 controlled experiments based on three paradigms that tested if fear-related responses could be reduced without conscious awareness in highly phobic, transition-age y

SUBMITTER: Siegel P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11652263 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature