A Psychologist Is Treating a Patient with an Anxiety Disorder

Essay

A psychologist is treating a patient with an anxiety disorder and wants to measure the patient's anxiety while discussing upcoming feared events as a way of assessing the patient's progress in therapy. The psychologist measures heart rate before, during, and after her patient's discussion. She finds that discussion of the upcoming feared event is associated with increased heart rate, and concludes that her patient has not yet made enough progress in treatment. Discuss the grounds on which such a conclusion would be criticized, and describe what else the psychologist might do to measure her patient's progress.