Handbook of Childhood Psychopathology and Developmental Disabilities Treatment by Johnny L. Matson

Author:Johnny L. Matson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Emotive Imagery

Although the therapeutic procedure of systematic desensitization is less frequently employed nowadays, it is of interest to note that there is an age-downward variant that may still be feasible to apply, in particular when working with younger children. This technique has been described as “emotive imagery” (Lazarus & Abramovitz, 1962). An important feature of the emotive imagery procedure is that the child identifies himself with a “personal hero” (usually a person or cartoon character seen on television) and then makes up a narrative, in which the phobic stimulus is gradually introduced. After the imaginal exposure, during which the child – supported by the personal hero – effectively deals with the phobic stimulus, he/she is encouraged to apply these newly learned skills in real-life situations (King, Molloy, Heyne, Murphy, & Ollendick, 1998). In an attempt to examine the effectiveness of emotive imagery, Cornwall, Spence, and Schotte (1996) assigned 24 clinically referred 7- to 10-year-old children with a severe darkness phobia to either emotive imagery treatment or a waiting-list control condition. The results demonstrated that children in the emotive imagery group showed significant reductions in self-reports of darkness fear and clear improvement on a darkness tolerance test, whereas no such effects were observed in the waiting-list control group.

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