Breaking that Nasty Habit of Nail Biting

 

As a little child my mother always scolded me for biting my nails. To this day I continue to disobey this command given to me years ago. She always claimed that the underside of your fingernail is one of the dirtiest parts of your body according to a study she did while in college. I didn’t care I continued to do like thousands of other people whether I am nervous or stressed. Brad A. Dufrene, T. Steuart Watson, and Jennifer S. Kazmerski decided to answer the question of what led people to bite their nails and how to modify that behavior. Psychological analysis led the three researchers to find that leaving a twenty four year old graduate student alone most susceptible to biting her nails.

Before conducting the actual experiment, the psychologists were required to first develop different conditions to apply to the patient. After conducting the first round of experimentation, they then conducted a second follow up experiment of implementing the conditions yet again. The conditions included simple conversation unrelated to nail biting, a therapist commenting on nail biting, being alone, watching television alone, being alone while rating your nail biting behavior, some sort of demand with escape, and a demand without an escape. During the study a therapist would state something to the patient about nail biting whenever the behavior occurred, attempting to make the patient aware and correct the behavior.

The study led the psychologists to believe that the alone condition led to the most occurrences of the nail biting behavior such as watching television alone, being alone, or even filling out paperwork alone. The presence of another person in the room allowed the patient to be reminded when she went to bite her nails, causing the patient to eventually realize when she exhibits the behavior and stop herself before. The absence of a second person in the room forced the participant to focus on a specific task at hand, devoting the majority of her attention to the task and not on nail biting.

In order to measure the behavior the psychologists examined the length of the fingernail in centimeters in order to see if the treatment conditions worked. They defined nail biting for the experiment as “any digit crossing the plane of the participant’s lips.” Although the experiment led to results that show one bites his or her nails when left alone, the experiment only focused on one participant and the results cannot be applied to all situations. It does, however, follow previous data from past experiments. We must take the results at face value and understand that each person has different stimuli that cause them to bite his or her nails.

Brad A. Dufrene, T. Steuart Watson and Jennifer S. Kazmerski Behav Modif 2008 32: 913 originally published online 3 June 2008. http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/32/6/913.full.pdf+html

Picture from: http://www.toddlers-are-fun.com/toddler-nail-biting.html