Generality of research findings with exposure and response prevention In Ocd

The combination of exposure and response prevention is quite effective in treating the symptoms to which it has been applied. Some workers have even found changes in the brain following successful treatment of OCD symptoms with this technique.

However, examined studies in which exposure and response prevention had been used to treat OCD and found that 75% of them had used patients with cleaning and or checking rituals. Therefore, the effectiveness of the treatment may not yet be generalizable to patients with other OCD symptoms.

Exposure and response prevention have been used successfully in case studies with children and the elderly compared exposure and response prevention in individuals with the same procedures in group therapy and found the two to be equally effective. However, these results must be viewed as tentative since this study was criticized for having twice as many hours of therapy in the group condition.

The behavioral model of OCD

Consistent with the Mowre two-stage theory of fear and avoidance, the behavioral model proposes that compulsive behaviors are maintained by a process of negative reinforcement. In the two-stage model, obsessive fears are believed to be acquired in the way simple phobias are. That is, some initially neutral object takes on anxiolytic properties through pairing with an aversive event.

Compulsive rituals are strengthened and maintained because they decrease the anxiety by terminating the event that gives rise to it. While the model tends to fall short of explaining the acquisition of obsessions, it does give an adequate account of the maintenance of compulsive behaviors that reduce the anxiety evoked by the obsessions.