A 29-year-old woman with contamination obsessions and washing compulsions undergoes therapy in which she deliberately touches a doorknob and then is prevented from washing her hands until her anxiety subsides on its own, repeated across sessions. This technique is called:

• A Systematic desensitization
• B Exposure and response prevention ✓
• C Assertiveness training
• D Interpersonal therapy

Explanation

Exposure and response prevention is the psychological treatment of choice for obsessive-compulsive disorder. It exposes the patient to obsession-triggering cues while blocking the compulsive ritual, allowing anxiety to extinguish through habituation and demonstrating that feared consequences do not follow. Systematic desensitization uses relaxation and graded hierarchies and is aimed at phobias rather than compulsions, making it the closest distractor but incorrect here.

Reference: Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry, 12th ed.

High-yield for: NEET PGINI-CETNExTFMGEUSMLEPLABMRCP

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