phobias Flashcards
what is a phobia?
a pathological anxiety disorder which involve an irrational anxiety or fear that is directed towards a particular object or situation.
phobias can be split into three kinds:
specific - eg animals
social - extreme anxiety in social settings
agoraphobia - fear of being alone in public places eg crowed areas
the two process model states that phobias can be aquired by a process of classical conditioning and are then maintained through operant conditioning.
how can classical conditioning be applied to phobias?
Watson and Rayner’s study shows how classical conditioning principles can be used to give someone a phobia. a fear response to a neutral stimulus arises when the neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus. in the case of little Albert his fear response to a loud noise was replaced by a fear response to the rat by pairing it with the noise to form an association.
how can operant conditioning be applied to phobias?
for example, if a fear of something is rewarded, perhaps by someone getting attention, then that response is likely to be repeated. it might be that the negative consequences to an action lead to the phobia. that would mean learning through negative reinforcement, which means avoiding something that causes pain or fear.
this could be how the fear becomes a phobia, which is when the fear interferes with normal functioning.
how can SLT be applied to phobias?
bandura showed that children learned to imitate what they watched. if a role model shows fear of something then someone might imitate that behaviour. if the fear is punished, then the observer might not show that behaviour through observational learning, but often a fear is not punished, so that type of vicarious learning would not occur.
evaluation
- the evidence for the theories tends to come from a reductionist approach to study, whereas phobias involve the whole person.
- there is reliablity in bandura’s work because two judges observed the behaviour and their scores could be compared.
