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Joan Costa-Font, London School of Economics and Political Science,Tony Hockley, London School of Economics and Political Science,Caroline Rudisill, University of South Carolina
This chapter examines how individuals learn, and the biases and models that help expression information updating. Learning is arguably central of the effect of behavioural incentives, as incentives are behavioural stimuli, yet stimuli need to be perceived and hence learned about for them to exert an effect. This applies to monetary and social incentives as well as nudges. In a way, behavioural incentives are about understanding how making learning easier matters, such as making some stimuli more salient by priming them or priming a social norm. Learning often affects narratives which give structure to actions and gives rise to what we call confirmation biases. Learning is affected by people’s priors (views of the world people have before processing information), namely what they already know, their attitudes towards absorbing new information, trust, the credibility they attached to different information sources, and the need to understand new information to learn about something. Finally, individuals tend to learn from others. Learning is thus more than the process resulting from verbal or written messages. It might also result from emulation, opposition to others’ behaviours, or concerns about the judgement of others, to avoid shame or seek status.
Sleep benefits memory consolidation. Here, we tested the beneficial effect of sleep on memory consolidation following exposure psychotherapy of phobic anxiety.
Method
A total of 40 individuals afflicted with spider phobia according to DSM-IV underwent a one-session virtual reality exposure treatment and either slept for 90 min or stayed awake afterwards.
Results
Sleep following exposure therapy compared with wakefulness led to better reductions in self-reported fear (p = 0.045, d = 0.47) and catastrophic spider-related cognitions (p = 0.026, d = 0.53) during approaching a live spider, both tested after 1 week. Both reductions were associated with greater percentages of stage 2 sleep.
Conclusions
Our results indicate that sleep following successful psychotherapy, such as exposure therapy, improves therapeutic effectiveness, possibly by strengthening new non-fearful memory traces established during therapy. These findings offer an important non-invasive alternative to recent attempts to facilitate therapeutic memory extinction and consolidation processes with pharmacological or behavioral interventions.
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