Metzner: Learning Theory and the Therapy of Neuroses

Question 1

Avoidance Learning

Answer 1

Just like in class, avoidance training is when an animal responds to a CS to avoid a shock. So if there is a bell, it jumps to the other side of the shock grid before the shock.

Mowrer says two things are learned in the avoidance situation:
1. fear response (sympathetic nervous system)

2. instrumental response, that can be pain reduction (escape) or fear reduction (avoidance)

Question 2

Learning Theory and the Therapy of Neuroses

Answer 2

Therapy requires extinguishing both fear and avoidance response

You want to extinguish the escape response since it can no longer be reinforced by pain reduction

You could also punish the escape response by shocking it no matter what

Lastly, you can perform reality testing, where you prevent the avoidance response (like the glass barrier dogs can’t jump over)

There is an interesting problem that arises in therapy:

In order to punish you have to have dissimilar traumatic and therapeutic stimuli

In order to reality-test, you need similarity

Therefore can’t do both at the same time

Question 3

4 effective methods of extinguishing an avoidance response

Answer 3

1. Elicit an incompatible response by pairing shock with the response at the same time

Only works if you’re also using extinction on the fear response with some other method.

2. Reality test: prevent avoidance response (such as glass barrier)
3. Gradual emergence of the fear response
4. Flooding with the fear stimulus

Question 4

Methods to cure Neurotic Symptoms

Answer 4

Symptoms function like avoidance responses and can be extinguished as such

Can work for alcoholism, enuresis, stuttering, tics, obsessions, hysterical reactions, and phobias

Question 5

Experimental Neuroses

Answer 5

Wolpe argues that they are learned reactions

Used confinement experiments and administered shocks while pairing a CS

Shocks produce fear because they are confined, they limit the cues to the shock, and they don’t allow a consistent response to stop the shock

Question 6

Wolpe’s reciprocal inhibition

Answer 6

Worked on systems to counter sympathetic arousal, like relaxation, assertiveness and sexual arousal (parasympathetic, not sympathetic arousal)

Systematic desensitization

Question 7

Conditioning therapies

Answer 7

Wolpe’s methods have about 80% improvement ratings, vs. 60% from psychoanalysis

Difficult to say what really is “improvement”, must also be careful in what patients you use in these statistics

Wolpe may have inflated these statistics a bit, but so may have psychoanalysts

May have merit after all, because behavior techniques work where other therapies fail

Question 8

Theoretical Considerations

Answer 8

1. Fear vs. anxiety: some say interchangeable, others that fear is legitimate, anxiety is irrational.
   Fear could also be external, while anxiety is internal
2. Mowrer vs. Dollard and Miller

Repression of id vs. repression of superego (social learning)

Could be the different types of patients each saw. Freud saw upper middle class women so it may have been sex based, while Americans are more driven by hostility and dependence

3. Normal vs. neurotic anxiety
   Neurosis is a learned behavior with 3 components: anxiety, motor responses and ideas

How do we distinguish btw normal and neurotic anxiety? Investigate causes (UCS) or define the pathology

4. Individual differences: what is perceived as danger varies from person to person

Question 9

Psychotherapy

Answer 9

5 methods of extinction:

Use of shock

Presenting feared stimulus in small doses (systematic desensitization)

Parasympathetic inhibition (using assertiveness, sex or relaxation)

Reality testing (not allowing avoidance)

Different strategies work for different people/different situations

Positive emotions expressed by the therapist can be beneficial

Insight is also positive; as long as it is accompanied by corrective emotional experience…can work to correct faulty thinking

Question 10

Metzner DOES NOT BELIEVE in unitary theory like Hull or Guthrie because:

Answer 10

1. The avoidance response may be different than the escape response. A rat may learn to do different things when trying to avoid a shock and when escaping a shock.
2. Hull believed that a stronger fear reaction would occur with a long shock as opposed to a short shock. This is not the case
3. Hull believed that there is more fear learning when the CS is contiguous with shock termination, not shock onset. This is also not true.
4. The fact that there are both avoidance and escape behaviors suggests that there are two systems, and not one like Hull or Guthrie suggest.

In the two-factor system, operant conditioning is superior, but there are a few exceptions to this

Other facts about avoidance learning: fear is an acquired drive, can learn to be helpless when nothing it does can make it escape