PUTTING on a brave face could actually make your fear worse, a study shows.
An international expert on fear and phobias says her research has found it helps people to talk about their fears while they are experiencing them - and in some cases the best treatments involve scaring them more.
Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology and director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, said keeping people in a heightened fear state seems to help them learn to deal with their fearful emotions.
Professor Craske delivered the keynote speech yesterday at the Australian Psychological Society Annual Conference in Perth, arguing that traditional approaches to dealing with fear often don't work in highly fearful or anxious people.
"Most of the traditional approaches to exposure therapy are about trying to get rid of the fear in the moment," she said. "But that fear in the moment might be the most critical thing in the long term."
She said traditional exposure therapy - such as taking someone with a fear of heights up a building and exposing them one floor at a time - often simply did not work.
"But the problem is people with anxiety disorder have different ways of inhibiting their fear, and in fact that might be why they have become anxious in the first place," she said.
Professor Craske said someone with a fear of heights might benefit more from being taken to different floors of the building randomly, and being kept in a highly aroused state.
In the case of someone with a fear of public speaking, she might advocate getting them to speak before a critical audience.
Professor Craske last month published research findings showing people with a fear of spiders who were told to speak about their fears and feelings about a spider they were exposed to exhibited reduced physical fear responses when they next saw the spider.
"Traditional models try to change the way the person thinks … by telling them to talk to themselves and talk about how the experience is not so bad," she said. "But when you label an emotion and start to watch your feelings it can have quite an impact." That study, of 88 arachnophobes, found a week after being exposed to a live Chilean rose-haired tarantula, people who had expressed their fears had reduced physical responses in their skin and were able to move closer to the spider than people who used other techniques such as speaking neutral words or trying to distract themselves.
Professor Craske said while putting on a brave face was not helpful, treatment still required a lot of bravery.
''You have to be brave enough to go and face the situation, but you are talking about what you feel while you do it,'' she said.
