I have a feeling that the specificity of exposure should be more or less irrelevant in behavioral therapy of agoraphobia secondary to panic disorder, since the fear is of being unable to escape or receive help regardless of the specific surroundings, as opposed to what one might observe in situational specific phobia. Therefore, it shouldn't matter whether one is stuck on a plane or in an elevator, for instance, and exposure should work in both situations. However, I can't find any research to sustain this claim. Could anybody point me in the right direction? Thank you very much!
Hi @Michael, thanks for your kind reply! I'm familiar with in vivo exposure as a procedure, but I wonder if exposure to a type of situation would generalize across situations of the same type, even if the situations are not exactly the same. I found some evidence that exposure doesn't typically generalize across stimuli, but because of the nature of agoraphobia I was wondering if it might for this particular disorder.
"since the fear is of being unable to escape or receive help regardless of the specific surroundings, as opposed to what one might observe in situational specific phobia."
I think it is precisely related to specific surroundings. Erasmus Darwin noted it in travel across a snow-filled landscape where visual reference points were absent. The problem is one of body and space instability due to fluctuating vestibular dysfunction in the inner ear where compensatory visual fixation is absent or ambiguous.
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