Chapter 1 - Atypical Behaviour Flashcards
What is fear?
- Normal emotion we’ve all felt
- Something felt by all animals as a result of a real, possible or imagined danger
- We need fear in order to survive, keeps us safe and away from harm
How do we respond to something we fear?
Considering how likely we are to be hurt then acting accordingly
Atypical behaviour
- Behaviours which go against social norms
- When someone defies social norms it attracts our attention and makes us wary of people whose behaviour doesn’t conform to social norms
What is a social norm?
A behaviour or belief which most people within a society stick to
What if the behaviour that defies the social norms is harmless?
We might think of people as having eccentric or rebellious behaviours rather than atypical ones
Name two examples of atypical behaviours.
- Mental disorders, not many people have them
- In relation to fear, these atypical behaviours could be in relation to a phobia
What is a phobia?
- Intense, persistent and irrational fears
- Can be activities or situations like: flying.
- Can also be contexts such as confined spaces, hospitals, schools etc.
- Can also be objects like: snakes, rats or spiders
- Avoiding the stimulus
- Will have an impact on people’s everyday lives
- Generalise phobia to other things
- Not always remembered how you got it
Acrophobia
- Fear of heights
- People w/ this phobia may avoid situations where they’re high up like: high up suits in hotels, standing close to edge of cliff and standing on top of Eiffel Tower
- Rationally, fear of heights stops us falling of things so in moderation it’s quite healthy
How might people with acrophobia respond to being somewhere high?
Closing their eyes, kneeling down or crawling on all fours
Arachnophobia
- Most common specific phobia
- People w/ this phobia will spend lots of time avoiding encountering a spider
- Could involve checking shoes, rooms and beds for spiders
- Some can’t even look at pictures of them
- Rationally, a fear of spiders in places like the Australian outback is probably v wise - some are venomous!
Fear of heights
Acrophobia
Fear of spiders
Arachnophobia
Agoraphobia
- Fear of open spaces w/ no place to be concealed or to escape to
- Evolutionarily advantageous for survival
Fear of open spaces
Agoraphobia
Social phobia
- Fear of social situations which involves feeling although everyone is looking at you, criticising or judging you
- People w/ phobia get v concerned that they’ll do something embarrassing and so will avoid social situations
- Authority figures especially frightening, they have power and authority to punish!
- Rationally, in evolutionary terms, it’s v dangerous to be confronted by a large group of staring unknown strangers, could once have been a good thing in order to aid survival
Fear of social situations being judged
Social phobia
School phobia
- Version of a social phobia but it pertains to school
- Quite difficult to diagnose
- Most common in 11-12 year old boys
- If they DO have a phobia of school it might be a certain aspect of it rather than school as a whole:
• reading in front of everyone in class
• being isolated in the playground
• being bullied
• getting changed for PE
These could all be things children develop phobias of
Why is a school phobia difficult to diagnose?
There’s lots of reasons why children refuse to go to school, might not be bc they have a phobia of it
Fear of a school or a certain aspect of school
School Phobia
What is a reaction to a phobia?
There are many physiological responses when you encounter something you have a phobia of
Physiological
Bodily
What are some examples of the bodily responses you can experience when you encounter something you have a phobia of?
- a pounding heart
- sweating
- dizziness
- a loss of control
What do these bodily responses do?
If they happen everything you experience something you have a phobia of they can have a real impact on your life and the way you live it
What will happen if someone has a TRUE phobia of spiders?
- They’ll go out of their way avoiding them which may have an impact on their everyday life:
• plan journey to work to avoid path with spiders in it
• will avoid dusty corner in staffroom
• will avoid googling ‘spider diagrams’ in case a photo of a spider comes up
What is the core theory?
Behaviourist Theory
What is the behaviourist theory?
- Classical conditioning
- Operant conditioning
- We learn most phobias through classical conditioning
What is classical conditioning?
- When we come to associate something that does not produce any response (neutral stimulus) w/ something that already produces that response (unconditioned stimulus)
- When we experience them together, leads us to respond to neutral stimulus in the same way we respond to unconditioned stimulus
- Neutral stimulus now conditioned stimulus
- Your response is a reflex response aka unconditioned response - you don’t have to learn it
What is classical conditioning useful for?
Explaining conditions in which the main symptom is a respond to a stimulus
e.g. in phobias, we respond w/ fear to something
What is the alternate theory?
Evolutionary Theory
What is the evolutionary theory?
- It’s based on nature
- It looks at WHY we have evolved to be fearful of certain things but not others
Evolutionary theory, nature explanation?
- Humans have evolved to be extra-sensitive to things which can harm them
- Those who learned quickly to distinguish between threatening and non-threatening objects, contexts or activities = more likely to survive than those who were slow
- Those who survived, reproduced. Species continued to exist
What is preparedness?
- The ability to associate certain things w/ danger
- Explains WHY we have phobias of objects (like spiders) or situations (like heights)
- spiders are potentially venomous
- heights are potentially dangerous if you get too close to the edge
Evolutionary theory: how much do we fear things that look like us?
- It seems the more something looks like we do, the less we fear it
e. g. spiders and snakes look nothing like us, so we fear them more than chimpanzees
Why do we fear things less if they look like us?
we feel we can more accurately predict it’s behaviour
What does evidence suggest about phobias?
- They’re difficult to get rid of
- The more threatening the object, context or situation is for our survival - the harder it is to get rid of
Why is it harder to remove a phobia of spiders than a phobia of flowers?
Flowers are a lot less threatening to our survival than a tarantula is
What does the evolutionary say about the reason we do not have a phobia of cars?
- We don’t have a phobia of cars as we do in same was as spiders bc we’ve had a millennia to develop phobia of spiders and only 100 years since fist car
- We have yet to develop an innate mechanism to fear cars
Operant conditioning
- Learned response, not a reflex, which gains either positive or negative outcome
- Person learns behaviour results in reward. If consequences positive, they will repeat behaviour. If consequences negative, they will be u likely to repeat behaviour
Operant conditions in relation to phobias:
- Explains continuation of phobic behaviour after developing phobia due to classical conditioning
- Some of behaviours to avoid feared object will have a positive outcome (prevent scary situation of encountering feared object) they will repeat behaviours in future
Can conditioned responses due to classical conditioning be removed?
- Yes
- Imagine pavlov’s dogs were no longer fed after hearing footsteps. Overtime, they would learn food was not on its way and stop salivating
- The salivation response has been removed
Can conditioned responses due to operant conditioning be removed?
By removing the reward, you can remove an operantly conditioned response
Evaluation on the behaviourist theory:
:( - two people can have the same experience but only one will develop a phobia
:( - Behaviourists assume you need direct experience, you can develop a phobia of something you have no direct experience of
e.g. in the UK, snakes are incredibly uncommon and many people have never seen one yet people still develop phobias of them
What is the core study?
Watson and Rayner (1920) - “Conditioned emotional responses”
AIM
To find out if it is as possible to teach a young child to be frightened of something that had not previously frightened him using classical conditioning methods
What type of experiment was the core study?
Laboratory experiment but it was written up as case study as involved only one case: case of Little Albert
Who was Little Albert?
Healthy, well developed, unemotional and stable baby
METHOD - Procedure: Session I
Procedure Session I: Albert 9 months old, texted to see what he was naturally frightened of.
Procedure Session II: 2 months later, Albert 11 months old, began classical conditioning process - showed Albert white rat and as he reached out and touched it Watson struck iron bar. He jumped and whimpered
What did they test to see what little Albert was afraid of?
- Procedure: Session I
- Gave him: a white rabbit, dog, monkey, people w/ masks, people w/out masks, people w/ hair, people w/out hair, cotton wool and burning newspaper
- Albert was not frightened of any of these and wanted to touch and play w/ them
What did they find Little Albert was afraid of?
- Procedure: Session I
- The sound of the noise of an iron bar being hit with a hammer
How did Little Albert react to the iron bar sound?
- Procedure Session I
- Stimulation 1: Arms raised in characteristic manner
- Stimulation 2: Same thing occurred, lips began to pucker and tremble
- Stimulation 3: Child broke into a sudden crying fit
METHOD - Procedure: Session II
2 months later, Albert 11 months old, began classical conditioning process - showed Albert white rat and as he reached out and touched it Watson struck iron bar. He jumped and whimpered
METHOD - Procedure: Session III
- Seven days later, Albert saw rat and showed some fear
- Watson repeated bar-hitting procedure five times during session
- By end of session, Albert cried the minute he saw the rat
- This was last time Albert heard striking of iron bar
METHOD: Procedure - Session IV
- 5 days later, Albert shown rat, a rabbit, dog, fur coat, cotton wool, Watson’s hair and Santa Claus beard
- Albert showed some fear when presented w/ any of them
- He was shown a rat and some more of other feared objects twice more. Continued to be afraid of them although not as extreme as time went on
What happened after the study?
- We don’t know, alberts mother removed him from lab
- Might be Little Albert how’s older and still scared of white rats or anything white and fluffy
FINDINGS
- Little Albert was conditioned to be afraid of something which had not previously frightened him —> aim explained
- Could explain its possible to classically condition young child to be afraid of something and fear could be generalised
- Little Albert became scared of rat, went on to other things. Appeared generalised, not initially expected to find
What are the conclusions to this core study?
- By applying this to reality, Watson and Rayner suggested it was prob how people develop diff phobias
- We learn to associate something we’re scared of w/ something else which we then become scared of
Evaluation on the core study:
:( - Case study, not generalisable, Little Albert is not indicative of the population at large
:( - Lab experiment, lacks ecological validity in real world can’t tell us for sure that we develop phobias in such a manner
:( - Unethical
:) - Lab experiment, completely valid, child became scared of rat
:) - Control for extraneous variables since it’s a laboratory experiment
:) - We can learn you can be made to be afraid of something using classical conditioning and that fear can be generalised to other similar things
Ethics of the core study
- Ethical guidelines didn’t really exist at time, didn’t officially do anything wrong
- Obviously unethical due to harm and distress inflicted on Albert
- His mother gave informed consent, is this enough?
- Maybe W and R didn’t realise how much of an impact classical conditioning could have on Albert
- We don’t know if he was desensitised after, mother removed him from experiment
Application to real life
Two main ways to cure phobias
What are the two main methods of ‘curing’ phobias?
- Systematic desensitisation
- Flooding
What is systematic desensitisation?
- Create a hierarchy of feared objects w/ the least scary at the bottom and most scary at top
- Learn relaxation techniques so client learns to relax ‘on command’
- Will start at bottom and imagine least scary thing and employ relaxation technique at same time
- Learn a new association between relaxation/calm with the item
(Repeat until at the top of the list until they associate the most scary thing w/ calm)
