Flooding - Thomas Stampfl (1967) Flashcards
What is flooding?
It involves placing the phobic in a situation with their fear for a prolonged period of time without being able to remove themself from the situation
How is flooding linked to classical conditioning?
Through continual exposure to their fear, they will eventually see it as less fear producing and therefore will have replaced the fear response with a different, non fear response
The theory is that the person becomes too physically tired for the conditioned response to occur as the sympathetic nervous system which
enables an alarm reaction can only happen for a certain length of time as the parasypathetic nervous system stops its action
What will the person eventually associate the feared object with?
A calm reaction
Flooding is much faster than other treatments as it only involves one session of extreme exposure rather than
repeated sessions of different intensities, it may be more successful with big phobias if they aren’t successful at maintaining relaxation
What did Wolpe (1973) find?
A girl who was scared of cars. Wolpe took her on a drive in the car and at first she was upset but calmed down
What makes it credible?
Based on established principles of CC and uses biological processes to explain how it works
The treatment runs the risk of increasing the fear rather than extinguishing it as some clients aquire more anxiety during the therapy e.g Barrett (1969)
used this for a treatment of snake phobias in college students and one student associated snakes with closing her eyes meaning she couldn’t sleep
Why might flooding not be ethical?
It involves purposely placing someone into a situation of great distress so there is an issue of social contol as they cannot get out of it
Mott et al (2013) studies 20 veterans in an exposue therapy group in order to test the effectiveness of flooding on post traumatic stress disorder, what did he find?
Mott found that ppts were very satisfied and found it helpful, 85% felt they had experienced a reduction in their symptoms
Willis and Edwards (1969) found SD was more successful than implosion therapy in reducing fear of mice in 50 female ppts, flooding was
no more effective than SD, effects of SD still found 7 weeks after
Boulougouris, Mark and Marset (1971) found flooding to be more succesful than SD in 16 ppts and found that the effects of flooding
last over 12 weeks
Spontaneous recovery may occur as extinction of the response occurs quickly meaning that the dissociation is likely to be weak making
the treatment short lived, not likely to be the case in SD where the process takes place over time making a stronger dissociation
