Abstract
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an increasing number of articles began to appear in behavioral journals on the treatment of dating anxiety. This was not a response to a sudden recognition that dating-anxious individuals were desperately in need of treatment, but rather an academic reaction to mounting criticism of analog studies of behavioral techniques which focused on problems such as snake and spider phobias (Bernstein & Paul, 1971; Cooper, Furst, & Bridger, 1969). Dating anxiety, or heterosocial anxiety as it was often called, had a number of characteristics which made it an excellent target behavior for analog behavioral research (Borkovec, Stone, O’Brien, & Kaloupek, 1974): (1) it frequently occurred in psychiatric populations, so it was seen as more worthy of attention than simple phobias; (2) it occurred frequently enough among college students to provide adequate sample sizes; (3) it often involved physiological arousal, which was useful for testing desensitization treatments which were particularly popular at the time; and (4) it caused disruption in the individual’s life and, in fact, was identified as a significant problem among college students (Bryant & Trower, 1974). However, Heimberg (1977) argued that the high incidence and amount of distress experienced by dating-anxious college students made dating anxiety among college students worthy of treatment attention in its own right, not just as an analogue to the problems of psychiatric patients.
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Hope, D.A., Heimberg, R.G. (1990). Dating Anxiety. In: Leitenberg, H. (eds) Handbook of Social and Evaluation Anxiety. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2504-6_8
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