Effects of repeated exposure to fearful and disgusting stimuli on fear renewal in blood-injection-injury phobia.

Although exposure is effective for blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia, fear often returns after treatment. While disgust has been implicated in BII phobia, its effects on fear renewal are unclear. To address this knowledge gap, the present study examined the effect of repeated video exposure to fearful and disgusting stimuli in multiple contexts on fear renewal in BII phobia.

Is disgust proneness sensitive to treatment for OCD among youth?: Examination of diagnostic specificity and symptom correlates.

Although disgust proneness has been implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), there is a paucity of research examining change in disgust proneness during treatment as well as the correlates of such change, especially in children. This study examined the relationship between changes in disgust proneness and disorder-specific symptoms during residential treatment among youth with OCD, anxiety, and mood disorders. Youth ages 12-18 (n=472) completed pre- and post-outcome measures of OCD, anxiety, and mood symptoms and disgust proneness.

Development and initial validation of the Child Disgust Scale.

Although disgust sensitivity (DS) has been implicated in the development of anxiety disorders in children, the absence of a measure of DS specifically for children has not allowed for an adequate test of this claim. To fill this important gap in the literature, this investigation presents a series of studies on the development and examination of the psychometric properties (including reliability, validity, and factor structure) of scores on a newly developed Child Disgust Scale (CDS). Exploratory factor analysis in Study 1 (N = 1,500) found that a bifactor model, which allows for a "g" DS factor in addition to 2 distinct factors of Disgust Avoidance and Disgust Affect, was the best fit for the data.

Context effects on habituation to disgust-relevant stimuli.

Although exposure-based treatments appear to be efficacious for the treatment of anxiety-related disorders, many individuals experience a renewal of the original fear response at follow-up. In an effort to prevent fear renewal, researchers have begun to use exposure of the conditioned stimulus in different contexts during extinction. Although studies continue to accumulate, showing that conducting exposure in multiple contexts buffers against the renewal of distress responses to fear-relevant stimuli, it remains unclear how conducting exposure in multiple contexts affects the renewal of distress responses to disgust-relevant stimuli.