The use of benzodiazepines during behavioural treatment is frequently encouraged. However, this review of clinical studies failed to find any beneficial effect of the drugs on therapy outcome. An examination of drug effects on different response variables revealed conflicting results concerning behaviour, i.e. approach. Whilst the anxiolytic nature of the drugs is well established in results on autonomic measures in the absence of the phobic object, they had no effect during its presence. Verbal report data again favour administration of benzodiazepines but studies on cognitive effects of long-term use are still to come. It is recommended that the use of this group of drugs as an adjunct to behaviour therapy should be discouraged.

In a recent paper Eysenck asked why conditioned responses show incrementation. In several publications he has provided the outline of an answer, which he has used in proposing a theory of the development of neuroses. It is suggested here that in the way he sets out the problem and in the development of his theory of incubation he overstates the applicability of the theory, incorporates questionable assumptions, and omits thorough consideration of competing accounts. The theory focuses on classical conditioning to the near-exclusion of other processes of behaviour change, ignores the consequences and social context of neurotic behaviour, and provides an incomplete discussion of the temporal patterning of relevant events. By taking a view which is broader in terms of psychological processes, environmental events, and temporal sequences, alternative models of the development of phobias can be offered. These involve classical and operant conditioning, and observational and informational learning.

Fourteen long-stay psychiatric patients on a token economy ward were divided into two groups to assess whether the giving of tokens affects staff–patient interaction. Group one received contingent praise and tokens; Group two contingent praise and non-contingent tokens. The length of time and frequency of nurse–patient interactions was measured in both groups over a 5-month period. Several significant differences between groups were found. The giving of contingent tokens affected nurses' behaviour in the following ways.

This study tested the hypothesis that operant response suppression strategies function more effectively when predetermined stimulus context variables are explicitly manipulated as “intervention facilitators”. Specifically, the self-stimulatory “book flipping” behaviours of a young autistic child were subjected to a brief immobilization contingency both in the presence and the absence of a contrived Sd stimulus comparison factor. An ABCBC multiple baseline across settings analysis of the subject's self-stimulatory responding under these conditions revealed a clear enhancement of response suppression effects when the above stimulus control feature was incorporated into the strategy. Results are discussed in light of contextual vs. absolute criteria for defining behaviour as undesirable, and the implications of stimulus control knowledge for suppression programming in general are explored.

Exposure and response prevention has recently been reported as a successful treatment for binge eating in obesity (Smith, 1981). This present paper further extends this treatment to modification of binge eating in a single case study of a young anorexic woman. Binge eating decreased during treatment and this improvement was maintained at 9 months follow-up. Satisfactory weight was also attained during treatment and maintained at follow-up.

Seven patients with angina pectoris were treated with relaxation training, electromyographic feedback and feedback of heart rate, pulse transit time or the product of these measures. Six showed a decreased frequency of anginal attacks, of trinitrin usage and an increased exercise tolerance.