There seems to be a considerable agreement that anxiety and stress play a decisive role in the formation of psychoneurosis, psychosomatic disorders, insomnia, unsocial and untisocial behaviors and, what the author calls, "anxiety syndromes." (Uchiyama, 1984). Behavioral approaches to trophotropic shift or low arousal shift are described as paradigmatic rationales for the effective ways of treating anxiety and stress, i.e., what Hess (1925) calls, ergotropic state. The paradigms specified here for them are three types of learning: respondent, operant, and cognitive. In the respondent type approaches, the paradigm of trophotropic shift is found, first of all, in reciprocal inhibition (Wolpe, 1958), where a variety of anxiety-inhibiting responses are enumerated, such as muscular relaxation, assertion, feeding, motor (Tagami & Uchiyama, 1983), respiratory, and some other responses (Uchiyamu, 1970; 1978). The roles of responses attained by oriental ways of training, such as Zen, Yoga, TM, and other group processes, are also suggested. In the operant type of learning, the rationales of trophotropic shift from anxiety to homeostasis (Selye, 1946) are activated through the progress in the research of biofeedback, a technology of operant control over respondent, involuntary responses, e.g., EEG, GSR, and the like (Uchiyama, et al., 1976; 1977). incorporating reward learning and other operant techniques, social skills training (SST) (Shimada & Uchiyama, 1982), structured learning thrapy (SLT) and other small group activity procedures are working well as the effective means of low arousal shift to emotional stability. Modeling, vicarious learning, covert conditioning, and many other cognitive types of learning, now attracting the attention of modern learning theorists, are expected to take an active part in shifting the ergotropic state to the trophotropic one. In one of our cognitive types of researches, vicarious reinforcement with covert modeling proved effective in giving impetus to the trophotropic shift, and consequently, increasing the assertive behaviors in the non-assertives (Maeda & Uchiyama, 1982). Rational emotive therapy (RET) (Ellis, 1962), rational behavior therapy (RBT) (Maultsby, 1975), cognitive behavior modification (CBM) (Meichenbaum, 1977), and other cognitive procedures (Tagawa, Sakano, and Uchiyama, 1982) are suggested to be effective as the devices of trophotropic shift.
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