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Thought-stopping: a coping strategy for impending feared events.

This paper describes a thought-stopping procedure for reducing the anticipatory anxiety and feelings of helplessness typically experienced by school-age children who know that they are to have a painful diagnostic or treatment intervention. The procedure involves having the child (with adult help) first prepare a set of positive cognitions about the feared event, then memorize them, and finally repeat them each time the event comes to mind. As developed here, our procedure eliminates major weaknesses of previous approaches to thought-stopping. First used to help young retarded children to reduce anxiety about dental treatments, our thought-stopping procedure can be applied successfully to a diverse group of impending pediatric pain situations. It has proved successful with short-term, acute care patients as well as with chronically ill children who require continuing care. Detailed examples of specific applications of this procedure are provided, along with a possible explanation for its efficacy.