COPING WITH ORAL-SURGERY BY SELF-EFFICACY ENHANCEMENT AND PERCEPTIONSOF CONTROL

Recent work has suggested that patients coping could be improved in st ressful dental situations if perceptions of self-efficacy and control could be enhanced. To test this hypothesis, 70 first-time third-molar extraction patients were randomly assigned to one of four surgery prep aration conditions: standard preparation, oral premedication, relaxati on, and a relaxation + efficacy-enhancing feed-back condition in which subjects were given false galvanic skin response (GSR) biofeedback le ading them to believe that they were highly skilled at relaxing. Analy ses indicated that: (1) all treatments were seen as equally credible ( controlling for placebo effects); (2) a priori contrasts showed that b oth the relaxation-only treatment and the relaxation + efficacy-enhanc ement treatment were superior to the premedication and standard prepar ations in raising coping self-efficacy; (3) regardless of treatment co ndition, increase in reported coping self-efficacy was significantly c orrelated with pre-operative anxiety, with self-reported peri-operativ e distress, and with behavioral ratings of peri-operative distress; an d (4) the relaxation treatments resulted in lower pre-operative anxiet y than the other interventions, and linear contrasts showed significan t trends in which the relaxation + efficacy-enhancing condition was su perior to the relaxation-only condition, which was in turn superior to the medication condition and the standard preparation in reducing bot h pre-operative anxiety and behavioral ratings of peri-operative distr ess. It was concluded that thoughts related to self-confidence and con trol can be manipulated, and that these thoughts can in part determine how well a person copes in stressful dental situations.