Advancing the treatment of anxiety disorders in transition‐age youth: a review of the therapeutic effects of unconscious exposure

The real-world effectiveness of exposure-based therapies for youth depends on the willingness and ability of young people to tolerate confronting their fears, which can be experienced as highly aversive and create problems with treatment engagement and acceptance. Recently, neuroscientific research on the nonconscious basis of fear has been translated into novel exposure interventions that bypass conscious processing of feared stimuli and that thus do not cause phobic youth to experience distress. We present a review of these unconscious exposure interventions.