Edna Foa on Prolonged Exposure

Dr. Edna Foa, the extremely influential anxiety disorder researcher and University of Pennsylvania professor, authored a brief article in the December issue of Depression and Anxiety. For those who don’t recognize her name, Foa is an enormously influential psychologist who developed the emotional processing theory as a unifying theory to guide exposure therapy, and is perhaps best known for her pioneering work in developing Prolonged Exposure Therapy, a gold standard treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. In 2010, Time magazine include her in 2010 in their list the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

In “Prolonged Exposure Therapy: Past, Present, and Future,” Foa offers a brief summation of the work on prolonged exposure. Foa doesn’t address the recent criticisms directed at the emotional processing theory, particularly newer research that suggests habituation is not necessary in exposure therapy. However, the brief article provides a concise summary of the research on prolonged exposure. I learned that it has been adapted for use with complication grief, which I didn’t know before.

• exposure therapy