Introduction: Dental appointment has been considered a stressful situation in children with elevated anxiety and avoidance behavior, which if not effectively managed will possibly continue to adulthood. There are various techniques of managing anxious children in dental clinics like communicative, pharmacologic, and nonpharmacologic interventions, but recently the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry has recommended to conduct more studies on nonpharmacologic interventions.
Aim:The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of two nonpharmacologic behavior management techniques, filmed modeling (FM) and Tell-Show-Do (TSD) technique, on dental anxiety in children and to compare them based on heart rates and modified Venham's anxiety scale.Materials and methods: Twenty children aged between 6 and 9 years who were on their first dental visit were split into groups I and II. Group I children were conditioned for restorative treatment by TSD technique, whereas group II with FM. The anxiety levels were recorded at different intervals for the two techniques using heart rate and modified Venham's anxiety rating scale. Student's t-test was done to compare heart rate between two groups at various time intervals, and Pearson's correlation coefficient was done to measure the relation between heart rate and Venham's score.
Results:No statistically significant differences were seen in heart rate measures, clinical anxiety scores of children between the two groups. The p-values for both the treatment groups at various time intervals were H 1 -0.660, H 2 -0.665, H 3 -0.835, H 4 -0.483, and H 5 -0.681 respectively. Student's t-test shows that there was no significant difference in both the treatment groups, and Pearson's correlation coefficient test shows that there is highly positive correlation at different time intervals, which means that as the heart rate increases, the modified Venham's score also increases.
Conclusion:Filmed modeling can be an efficient alternative method to TSD technique in preparation of the 6-to 9-year-old children during dental treatment.