If you have a fear of heights, called acrophobia, you probably consider activities such as standing on a glass ledge 103 stories high to be stressful. But a scientist in Switzerland says that cortisol, the stress hormone, can actually help banish your fear.
A team of researchers led by Dominique de Quervain at the University of Basel recruited 40 patients with serious acrophobia. All the patients received a series of virtual reality sessions, in which they traveled across virtual bridges and stood on virtual platforms, to treat their phobia.
This is a standard and effective treatment called exposure therapy. It assumes that the patient's phobia is a "conditioned response." Just like good old Pavlov's drooly dogs, a person reacts automatically to a specific stimulus (say, being up high) with a specific response (say, panic). But if you repeatedly expose patients to the stimulus in a safe environment, and help them ...
