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Wolpe's experiments and therapeutic work lie in this area.

He showed convincingly that anxiety is a learned ( conditioned ) reaction and is the basis of experimental and clinical neuroses and assumed, therefore, that the neuronal changes which underlie the neuroses are functional and reversible.

An important observation of Pavlov served as a guide post to achieve such a reversibility by physiological means.

In a conditioning experiment, he demonstrated the antagonism between feeding and pain.

A mild electrical shock served as a conditioned stimulus and was followed by feeding.

The pain became thus the symbol for food and elicited salivary secretion ( conditioned reflex ).

Even when the intensity of the shocks was increased gradually, it failed to evoke any signs of pain.

Since strong nociceptive stimuli produce an experimental neurosis during which the animals fail to eat in the experimental situation, Wolpe thought that he could utilize the feeding-pain antagonism to inhibit the neurotic symptoms through feeding.

Appropriate experiments showed that this is, indeed, possible.

He then applied this principle of reciprocal inhibition to human neuroses.

He took advantage of the antagonism between aggressive assertiveness and anxiety and found a relatively rapid disappearance of anxiety when the former attitude was established.