Effectiveness of Active and Passive Distraction Techniques on Reducing Fear and Anxiety and Improving Oral Health Knowledge of Children Undergoing Extraction in the Dental Operatory - A Randomized Controlled Trial

Dentists are expected to identify and effectively treat childhood dental diseases that are within the knowledge and skills acquired during their dental education. As every child is different, safe and effective treatment of oral diseases often requires modifying the child's behavior. Behavior guidance involves interaction of the dentist and dental team, the patient and the parent directed towards communication and education. Its goal is to ease fear and anxiety while promoting an understanding of the need for good oral health.

In 1936, Freud defined Anxiety as an unpleasant affective state or condition, which is characterized by all that is covered by the word 'nervousness' and it can be prevented by the avoidance of negative experiences and promotion of positive experiences in children attending the dental operatory.

In Pediatric dentistry, communicative management and appropriate use of commands have been used in both cooperative and uncooperative child.Commonly used techniques associated with this guiding process are tell-show-do, voice control, nonverbal communication, positive reinforcement and physical restraints. Even though these techniques decrease the perception of unpleasantness, avert negative behaviours, gain or maintain the patient's attention and compliance, it is impossible for pediatric dentists to divert their attention from perceiving pain during invasive dental procedures.

American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (2008) described distraction as a technique of diverting the patient's attention from what may be perceived as an unpleasant procedure. According to McCaul and Malott, one must attend to the pain stimulus in order to perceive it and also experience the associated distress. Thus distraction might help in reducing the pain perception. As the individual's attentional capacity is finite, a distracting task that requires a great deal of the person's attentional resources should leave little attentional capacity available for processing painful stimuli.

Thus, highly engaging and interactive distraction activities that involve multiple sensory systems are likely to be more effective than more passive distractors or distracters that involve only one or two sensory systems. A number of recent distraction interventions for acute pain in children and adolescents have employed virtual reality (VR) technology in conjunction with either a passive distraction stimulus, such as a movie (Sullivan, Schneider, Musselman, Dummett, & Gardiner, 2000), or an interactive distraction activity, such as a computer game (Dahlquist et al., 2007). However, the actual benefit of VR technology over and above the benefits of the distracting stimulus that is experienced through the VR equipment has not been adequately tested in children.