Video Feedback

Description of the Strategy

Ever since videotaping became financially feasible, psychologists have been interested in its potential use. Broadly speaking, video feedback describes any procedure involving showing a participant a videotape of himself or herself in order to provide information from an objective viewpoint. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the technique was first widely researched, applications varied widely, although the explicit or implicit goal of most efforts was to give participants a more realistic sense of their own appearance or behavior. This goal may be understood in a variety of theoretical contexts. A strict behavioral interpretation might hold that viewing the videotape is a form of exposure to a feared but actually harmless stimulus. Alternatively, watching the videotape might be construed as ...