on animals. At the same time, students of Skinner began applying principles of behavioral 
analysis to human behavior problems. The coming together of these two streams of work 
resulted in the major development called Behavior Therapy that is now considered the 
treatment of choice for phobias, compulsions, and other neuroses, such as anorexia nervosa, 
that can produce misery and even death. 
BIOFEEDBACK 
Lubar (1987) has observed: ‘‘Biofeedback is a field that belongs to no one discipline. 
Although it developed from the principles of operant conditioning, which lie at the heart of 
experimental psychology, it is a field that is employed by virtually all health care disciplines 
and spans such diverse areas as dentistry, internal medicine, physical therapy and 
rehabilitation medicine, psychology and psychiatry, and virtually all the subspecialties of 
internal medicine.” 
Experiments with animals on classical and operant conditioning of visceral responses 
contributed significantly to the development of biofeedback (Kimmel, 1967; White and Tursky, 
1982). Work has shown that humans can learn to control brain waves (Kamiya, 1969). 
Humans have also been shown to control the firing of single motor units — that is, a motor 
neuron and all the muscle fibers it innervates (Basmajian, 1963). These findings were based 
on earlier physiological experiments that discovered the existence of single motor units by 
studying the electrical activity of nerves in animals. 
Evidence for the effectiveness of biofeedback has been well documented in the treatment of 
neuromuscular disorders, headaches, Raynaud's disease, orthostatic hypotension, 
hypertension, and fecal incontinence (Miller, 1985). The wide application of biofeedback 
techniques to treat incontinence in institutionalized elderly could save the United States as 
much as $13 billion a year (Rodin, 1984). 
STRESS 
The relationship between stress and its adverse medical consequences has a long history in 
both basic and clinical research. Experiments with animals, in which the confounding factors 
of research with humans can be rigorously controlled, have confirmed, for example, that 
psychosocial distress can contribute to the development of coronary artery disease. Social 
disruption and isolation have been shown to promote atherosclerosis in birds, swine, and 
cynomolgus monkeys (Ratcliffe and Cronin, 1958; Ratcliffe et al., 1969; Shively et al., 1989), 
through mechanisms involving hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis and autonomic nervous 
system activation (Rozanski et al., 1999). Work in monkeys has been particularly important 
in demonstrating that personality traits along the dominance/subordinate spectrum can 
interact with environmental stress to influence the course of atherogenesis (Kaplan et al., 
1982). 
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