The Attitude Towards Heights Questionnaires (ATHQ) and Behavioural Avoidance Tests (BAT) are also used.However, acrophobic individuals tend to have biases in self-reporting. They often overestimate the danger and question their abilities of addressing height relevant issues. A Height Interpretation Questionnaire (HIQ) is a self-report to measure these height relevant judgements and interpretations. The Depression Scale of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales short form (DASS21-DS) is a self report used to examine validity of the HIQ. Treatment
Traditional treatment of phobias is still in use today. Its underlying theory states that phobic anxiety is conditioned and triggered by a conditional stimulus. By avoiding phobic situations, anxiety is reduced. However, avoidance behaviour is reinforced through negative reinforcement. Wolpe developed a technique called systematic desensitization to help participants avoid "avoidance". Research results have suggested that even with a decrease in therapeutic contact, densensitization is still very effective. However, other studies have shown that therapists play an essential role in acrophobia treatment. Treatments like reinforced practice and self-efficacy treatments also emerged.There have been a number of studies into using virtual reality therapy for acrophobia. Botella and colleagues and Schneider were the first to use VR in treatment. Specifically, Schneider utilised inverted lenses in binoculars to "alter" the reality. Later in the mid-1990s, VR became computer-based and was widely available for therapists. A cheap VR equipment uses a normal PC with head-mounted display (HMD). In contrast, VRET uses an advanced computer automatic virtual environment (CAVE).
Psychologists Richie Poulton, Simon Davies, Ross G. Menzies, John D. Langley, and Phil A. Silva sampled subjects from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study who had been injured in a fall between the ages of 5 and 9, compared them to children who had no similar injury, and found that at age 18, acrophobia was present in only 2 percent of the subjects who had an injurious fall but was present among 7 percent of subjects who had no injurious fall (with the same sample finding that typical basophobia was 7 times less common in subjects at age 18 who had injurious falls as children than subjects that did not).More studies have suggested a possible explanation for acrophobia is that it emerges through accumulation of non-traumatic experiences of falling that are not memorable but can influence behaviours in the future. Also, fear of heights may be acquired when infants learn to crawl. If they fell, they would learn the concepts about surfaces, posture, balance, and movement. Cognitive factors may also contribute to the development of acrophobia. People tend to wrongly interpret visuo-vestibular discrepancies as dizziness and nausea and associate them with a forthcoming fall. A traumatic conditional event of falling may not be necessary at this point. A fear of falling, along with a fear of loud noises, is one of the most commonly suggested inborn or "non-associative" fears. The newer non-association theory is that a fear of heights is an evolved adaptation to a world where falls posed a significant danger.