On M&M'S® and Dog Phobia

Fun With Behavior Therapy from the 70s, Part 2



In our next installment of food-based behavior therapies to treat phobias in adults, we have a case report of combined exposure/M&M treatment (Kroll, 1975). First is a description of the client's fear of dogs:

The client was a 22-yr-old female graduate student with a strong fear and avoidance of dogs. She had been told by her parents that a large brown dog had knocked her over when she was a child, but she did not remember the incident nor did she attribute her fear to it. She could not remember any time in her life when she was not afraid of dogs. The intensity of her fear was unaffected by size or breed of dog. If she was alone and saw a dog approaching her, she became highly anxious and walked away very rapidly or, if possible, crossed the street to avoid an encounter. When leaving her house and seeing a dog, she either exited through the back door or waited until the dog left before walking outside. If she was walking with another person and unavoidably encountered a dog, she became intensely anxious and held onto the other person tightly while attempting to put the person between her and the dog.

Next is description of the treatment, which included voluntary food deprivation. Notice, however, that the client did not agree to 24 hrs without food:

The client was instructed not to eat anything for 12-hr prior to the treatment session. It was originally planned that she would undergo 24-hr food deprivation, but she did not think she could go without eating longer than 12-hr. Because among her favorite foods M & M's were most preferred, I decided on using them to inhibit anxiety. She was told that they would have greater reward value than any other food and would therefore increase the probability of successfully inhibiting anxiety elicited by a feared object.

And here we have evidence of the therapist's condescending attitude:

Since I had told her of other cases in which food was used as an anxiety inhibitor, she was receptive to the use of M & M's. (It should be noted that she was unaware of the client populations with whom M & M's are typically used.)

So the client bought a large bag of M&M's and went to an animal shelter, accompanied by the therapist. From the very beginning, the therapeutic value of the M&M's is not really clear, given the calming presence of the therapist:

Upon entering the room in which the dogs were caged, the client's initial response was fear. She made no attempt, however, to leave the room. Starting at a distance of about seven feet--the farthest away in the room that one could stand from the animals--I walked with the client around the room as far as possible from the cages while feeding her M & M's. ... At the end of the session which lasted approximately 2-hr, she reported feeling relaxed in the presence of the dogs. She expressed confidence that she could encounter dogs without fear or need to avoid them.

It's scientifically proven! M&M'S® can cure phobias in a single 2 hr session! However, that laughable conclusion was even questioned by the author at the end of the article:

The possibility exists that, instead of the feeding, or perhaps in addition to it, graduated exposure or therapist-client interaction or modeling were responsible, singly or in complex interaction for the client's improvement. As control observations were not made, one cannot rule out the possibility that the feeding was superfluous.

To end on a serious note, one application of this approach to behavior therapy is not a laughing matter at all, as noted in a comment on my last post by Michelle Dawson, author of The Autism Crisis blog:

Not phobias, but extreme food deprivation has been used as an early autism treatment, with very young children.

You can find a 1970s use of extreme food deprivation at UCLA reported in this book. Lovaas' reported recommendation was 36hrs of food and liquid deprivation for a 4yr old. The purpose was to make the child "hungry and desperate enough to do anything for food." Instead the child got very sick, threw up bile, and was too tired and listless to work for his food.

Another book reports in passing the use of routine food deprivation as autism treatment by Lovaas at UCLA, within the most famous autism study ever.

To my knowledge there has never been any criticism of this kind of practice published in any journal.

I highly recommend her three part series on Autism Advocacy and Aversives: part one, part two, part three.

Reference

Kroll, H. (1975). Rapid treatment of dog phobia by a feeding procedure Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 6 (4), 325-326 DOI: 10.1016/0005-7916(75)90071-3