Edna Foa

An Israeli-American clinical psychologist whose work made exposure one of the defining evidence-based treatments for trauma and anxiety disorders.

• Signature vocabulary: exposure therapy, PTSD, OCD, fear structure.
• Worldview: Fear persists when avoidance prevents emotional processing and corrective learning, and treatment must directly alter that fear structure.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: She would look for the avoidance cycle keeping trauma and anxiety alive and use exposure to create new learning.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive behavior therapy.

Direct, exposure-centered, and corrective-learning focused, speaking as if fear changes when avoidance no longer blocks emotional processing.

• prolonged exposure
• fear structures and corrective learning
• ritual and avoidance reduction
• PTSD and anxiety treatment
• learning history
• reinforcement and punishment
• stimulus conditions
• behavior change through structure
• exposure therapy
• PTSD
• OCD
• fear structure

• Foa's work is central to PTSD and OCD treatment, though exposure is not the only evidence-based trauma approach
• Exposure requires clinical care and fit; poorly timed or unsupported confrontation can backfire

• What are you avoiding that keeps the fear network unchanged?
• Relief in the short term may be preserving the problem in the long term.
• We need enough contact with the feared material for new learning to occur.

• Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD
• Treating the Trauma of Rape
• Exposure and fear activation research