Flooding Flashcards
effectiveness
A strength of flooding as a treatment for phobias is that it appears to be an effective treatment. Wolpe (1973) took a girl who was scared of cars and drove her around for hours. Initially the girl was hysterical, but she eventually calmed down when she realized that her situation was safe, from then on, she associated a sense of ease with cars. Further support was also found by Choy et al (2007) who reported that flooding was more effective than systematic desensitization at treating phobias. Therefore, suggesting that flooding is a successful treatment for phobias.
It is less effective for social phobia
limitation of flooding as a treatment for phobias is that although flooding is highly effective for treating simple phobias it appears to be less effective for more complex phobias like social phobias. This may be because social phobias have cognitive aspects, for example, a sufferer of a social phobia does not simply experience an anxiety response but thinks unpleasant thoughts about the social situation. This type of phobia may benefit more from cognitive therapies because such therapies tackle the irrational thinking. This suggests that the effectiveness of flooding as a method of treating phobias is more dependent on the type of phobia
Appropriateness-Symptom substitution
Another limitation of flooding as a treatment for phobias is that the
psychodynamic model claims that flooding (and the other behavioural therapies in general e.g. SD) focuses only on symptoms and ignores the causes of abnormal behaviour.
Psychoanalysts claim that the symptoms are merely the tip of the iceberg - the outward expression of deeper underlying emotional problems. Psychoanalysts believe that whenever symptoms are treated without any attempt to work out the deeper underlying problems, then the problem will only show itself in another way, through different symptoms. This is known as symptom substitution. However, behaviourists reject this criticism and claim that we need
not look beyond the behavioural symptoms as the symptoms are the disorder.
