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8 DISCUSSION 203 the clinical relevance of the findings presented in the current dissertation should be examined. Furthermore, future research may take into account that the studies in the current dissertation mainly included self-report measures of fear, threat expectancy, and disgust. Previous studies showed that participants who verbalized their emotional experience during exposure to a feared stimulus showed a greater reduction in physiological fear responses than participants who did not label their affect during exposure (Tabibnia, Lieberman, & Craske, 2008; Kircanski, Lieberman, & Craske, 2012; Niles, Craske, Lieberman, & Hur, 2015). Reporting emotional experiences alters the perception of emotion (Lindquist, 2017), and might add to the beneficial effects of exposure. Future studies may, for example, replicate the experiment presented in chapter 3 (van Uijen, van den Hout, Klein Schiphorst, et al., 2017), and add a control condition in which participants repeatedly touch the contaminant without reporting their feelings of contamination, fear, danger, and disgust (CFDD) at each exposure trial, or in which participants repeatedly report CFDD, but do not touch the contaminant at each trial. CONCLUSION Safety behaviors are generally considered ubiquitously deleterious and dysfunctional, and are assumed to contribute to the persistence of irrational fears. In line with these assumptions, the research presented in the current dissertation indicates that safety behavior can prevent extinction learning and thereby maintain excessive threat beliefs and irrational fears. Moreover, it shows that safety behavior can contribute to the development of pathological anxiety by directly exacerbating threat beliefs. Furthermore, it suggests that safety behavior is resistant to fear extinction, and may promote a return of fear. Hence, the findings of the current dissertation indicate several ways in which safety behaviors contribute to the