08. Phobia Acquisition Flashcards
Describe fears and phobias (compare/differences).
-A fear can be sensible, such as a fear of heights to stop you leaning over too far.
-A phobia is more than a fear because it is irrational.
-Both can limit things you would like to do (become housebound).
-Phobias are irrational fears and are life-limiting.
-People with a phobia are aware that it is irrational.
-Anyone with a phobia, when they get near to their phobic situation of object, will experience strong anxiety. Symptoms may include fast breathing, feeling sick, dry mouth, fast heart rate and chest pain. Phobias mean that people tend to avoid certain situations due to these unpleasant situations.
Explain how phobias are acquired through step 1, classical conditioning.
(Mowrer’s two-step process).
-Classical conditioning of a phobia involves learning to associate one stimulus with another stimulus and response.
-One stimulus initially creates no response (called a neutral stimulus) and the other stimulus is one that already triggers an unconditioned response of fear (unconditioned stimulus).
-Through association, the NS is paired with the unconditioned response and unconditioned stimulus. The pairing may occur only once, which is called one trial learning.
-The neutral stimulus has now become the conditioned stimulus which had produced a conditioned response.
(This process was demonstrated by Watson and Rayner in their 1920 study on Little Albert).
Explain how phobias are acquired through step 2, maintenance through operant conditioning.
(Mowrer’s two-step process).
-In his two-process model of phobia acquisition, Mowrer suggested that phobias are acquired as a result of classical conditioning.
-However, many fears learned by classical conditioning become phobias therefore, Mowrer believed that phobias are maintained by operant conditioning.
-A person who is terrified of spiders is likely to run away when they see one. The escape and consequent reduction if fear acts as a negative reinforcer, increasing the likelihood they they will continue to avoid spiders in future.
-In this way, the phobia is maintained. When an individual avoids a situation which is unpleasant, the behaviour results in a positive consequence which means the behaviour is likely to be repeated.
-Mowrer suggested that whenever we avoid a phobic stimulus we successfully escape fear and anxiety that we would have suffered if we had entered its presence or remained there. This reduction in fear reinforces the avoid behaviour and so the phobia is maintained.
Define maintenance.
-The processing of maintaining something (keeping it going).
-If a phobia is acquired by classical conditioning we would expect it to decline over time unless some other process maintains it.
Describe the classical conditioning explanation of acquiring phobias.
-Something that yields the fear response (UCR) naturally is the unconditioned stimulus (UCS).
-The UCS which causes a UCR is paired with a neutral stimulus (NS) such as white rat.
-After a few pairings an association is learned and the NS becomes the CS and will produce the CR of fear.
-A fear has been conditioned to a previously neutral stimulus (NS).
Describe the operant conditioning explanation of acquiring phobias.
-If someone strokes a dog and is bitten by the dog, this could be a positive punishment (getting something unpleasant for stroking a dog). This would stop that person from stroking the dog.
-Then if the person avoids stroking a dog this would be rewarded by negative reinforcement (not getting bitten for not stroking the dog). So the person would continue to NOT stroke the dog.
-This could develop into a phobia of always trying to avoid dogs being negatively reinforced, leading to repeated behaviour to not touch dogs or go near them.
Describe the social learning theory explanation of acquiring phobias.
-If a model shows fear of a certain situation of object, then someone watching can learn that fear or phobia.
-Bandura showed that imitative behaviour occurs without any reward in his 1961 experiment.
-Leib et al (2000) found that children of parents with social phobia were likely to have social phobia as well (phobias run in families).
Describe the classical conditioning explanation of maintenance of a phobia.
-After CC causes learning, it does not last very long as extinction can occur if the pairing is not repeated, as shown in Watson and Rayner (1920) so it is probably not responsible for maintaining phobias.
-However, on trial learning may explain how phobias are maintained as the association can be so strong that the learning is very hard to undo and it does not become extinct. This can explain how CC explanation shows how the phobia can be maintained.
Describe the operant conditioning explanation of maintenance of a phobia.
-Thorndike’s Law of Effect explains that behaviour that is rewarded is repeated.
-Negative reinforcement explains how phobias can be maintained by avoiding the object that causes anxiety (eg a fear of going shopping, to avoid the fear, don’t go out, removing the negative feeling of fear, so the person repeatedly doesn’t go out). This reinforces the phobia repeatedly.
Describe the social learning theory explanation of maintenance of a phobia.
-If someone else is modelling a phobia, SLT can explain how it is maintained.
-If the mother is maintaining her phobia due to operant conditioning, then the child may model their behaviour on this and also maintain their phobia via vicarious reinforcement.
Define systematic desensitisation.
-A behavioural therapy designed to reduce an unwanted response, such as anxiety to a stimulus.
-SD involves drawing up a hierarchy of anxiety provoking situations related to phobic stimulus, teaching a client to relax, and then exposing them to phobic situations.
-Client works their way through the hierarchy whilst maintaining relaxation.
Define flooding.
A behavioural therapy in which a phobic client is exposed to an extreme form of a phobic stimulus in order to reduce anxiety triggered by that stimulus. This takes place across a small number of long therapy sessions.
Describe a strength of the real life application of explanations of phobia formation and limitations.
-Treatments such as systematic desensitisation and flooding therapy are based on the principles of learning a response through associations using classical conditioning.
-Understanding the maintenance of a phobia can help to prevent this from being repeatedly maintained and this may lead to the extinction of the phobia.
-This has practical value as this explanation of phobia acquisition can lead to being able to unlearn phobias and prevent maintenance through treatment such as systematic desensitisation and this is a strength as it is largely successful helping individuals and society.
Describe a limitation of the real life application of explanations of phobia formation and limitations.
There are other theories of how phobias are acquired include psychodynamic theory that phobias may be caused by displacing anxieties about another issue. If this is the case, then using systematic desensitisation will not remove the cause of the phobia and it may be an ineffective treatment for some people.
