How Praise Reshaped a Fear Response in the Lab

What the research found

Half of the forty-eight participants were told a lie. Midway through the session, after a fear had already been established and before the part of the procedure designed to undo it, twenty-four adults were informed that their questionnaire answers and their physiological readings had identified them as being in the top one percent of “copers” and to possess excellent abilities when dealing with stressful situations. Nothing of the kind had been measured. The statement was fabricated and identical for everyone who received it, and each of them was then asked whether they identified with the feedback and to name three keywords describing how they cope under stress.

The experiment was run by Armin Zlomuzica, Friederike Preusser, Silvia Schneider and Jürgen Margraf at the Mental Health Research and Treatment Center at Ruhr-University Bochum, and appeared in 2015 in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. The participants were healthy adults recruited on a university campus in Germany, averaging around twenty-four years of age, screened to exclude anyone reporting mental illness, treatment, or serious physical disease. All of them were debriefed at the end.

The fear itself was built from two inkblot images. One was followed on most of its appearances by a 500-millisecond mild electric stimulation to the lower arm; the other never was. Both groups learned the difference equally well, which the sweat response of the skin registers before a person can report it. Then came extinction, the laboratory model of what exposure therapy does: the threatening image was shown ten more times with no shock at all, so that the association could come apart.

It came apart faster in the flattered group. During extinction, those participants no longer responded differently to the dangerous image than to the safe one, in either the early or the late phase of the block. The control group went on distinguishing them throughout. The pattern showed up afterwards in what people said as well, with the control group still rating the shocked image as more unpleasant while the flattered group’s discrimination had faded. The authors state that the change was not produced by a general dulling of emotional response.

In the subgroup tested after debriefing, no effect on the skin conductance measure reached significance. Telling participants the compliment had been false did not put the fear back.

What it means for you and your child

The ten minutes before a lesson a child has come to dread are a recognisable interval: something went badly there once, and the dread has since attached itself to the room, the subject, the teacher’s voice. This experiment says something narrow about those ten minutes. A belief about one’s own capacity to cope, installed by words alone and held for a quarter of an hour, altered how quickly a learned fear loosened its grip when the feared thing turned out to be harmless.

Almost nothing follows from that about what to say to a child. The authors are direct on the point: a false positive verbal persuasion would probably be less appropriate for studying self-efficacy in real exposure therapy, and they suggest truthful routes instead, such as imagining future coping or recalling occasions of having coped before. Whether those work is untested here. So is the possibility that any personal feedback would have done it, since the control group received none at all, a gap the authors name themselves.

There is no way to say how much difference the manipulation made. The paper reports test statistics and p values and no effect sizes anywhere, so the magnitude is simply unavailable. These were also adults with no diagnosed anxiety, screened by self-report rather than interview, and extinction in a laboratory is what the authors themselves call an oversimplified model of exposure.

The induction moved participants’ sense of their own capacity on the measure taken during the session, and left the trait questionnaire, which asks about durable beliefs one holds about oneself, entirely unmoved. The inference this invites, and it is an inference, is that the feedback did its work at the moment of confrontation, and that the durable self-image was never involved.

Everything here happened inside a single afternoon. There was no test the next day, no test after a change of room, no test after a single reminder shock. Whether a belief installed in fifteen minutes is still doing anything by the following week is a question this experiment did not ask, and until someone asks it, the honest answer available to you is that nobody knows.