14 DAY TRIAL // For people suffering from diverse conditions – including addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias – could potentially benefit from the results of a new study. Researchers have shown that behaviors associated with a stimulus can be changed in a very simple way.
All healthcare experts need to do is match a new, desirable behavior with the intensity of the stimulus that caused the unwanted behavior in the first place. What this research is trying to address is the issue of relapse, which threatens people suffering from the aforementioned conditions even after treatment.
For many years, scientists have been trying to battle behaviors stemming from these types of disorders, but their efforts have largely failed, regardless of the approach they took. In addition, these behaviors can reduce people's quality of life, can cause pain and harm for prolonged periods of time.
In standard therapeutic approaches, people are though to associate new memories with existing stimuli. Ashtrays in a bar may naturally make a former smoker think of smoking, but therapists ask their patients to associate new memories with ashtrays.
The issue is that, while this may work in a doctor's office, people find it extremely easy to relapse into their old habits when they are out in the real word. “The therapist really has little control over the context in which the patient finds himself,” Dr. Ralph R. Miller explains.
The only solution the expert can see to this problem is to make the memory treatment itself stronger. Miller holds an appointment as a distinguished professor of psychology at the State University of New York, in Binghamton.
He authored the new study with SUNY colleague Mario A. Laborda. Their work appears in the latest issue of the Association for Psychological Science's (APS) journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, PsychCentral reports.
“We are developing excellent means in the animal lab to model human psychopathology, not just for screening drugs but for screening behavioral treatments. We additionally now have models of the treatment and the limitations of the treatments,” Miller explains.
“We are providing alternate memories that compete with the deleterious memory. The trick is that the newer memory when it is retrieved will be stronger than the deleterious memory,” the investigator concludes.