In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his presidency by
telling Depression-weary Americans that "the only thing we have
to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified
terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into
advance." FDR's bold and immediate confrontation of fear helped
him to galvanize a worried nation. Seventy years later,
scientists may have shed light on how he did that. New research
into the extinction of learned fear shows that, in lab animals,
facing fear upfront in closely spaced doses may work better than
facing it slowly over time. In the October 2003 issue of APA's
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes
(Vol. 29, No. 4), researchers at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA) described their exploration of different
approaches to extinguishing the fear of a conditioned stimulus.
"Massing" the feared stimulus--delivering it in concentrated
bursts, rather than pacing it with longer pauses in between--was
surprisingly efficient, at