phobias Flashcards
what are learning theories?
a collective term for explanations based on conditioning
what is acquisition?
the process of acquiring something, we tend to use the trm because it is theoreticaly neutral
what is maintainance?
the processing of maintaining something. if a phobia is acquired by classical conditioning we would expect it to decline over time unless some other process maintains it.
what is the two process model?
Mowrer (1960) proposed the two process model based on learning theory to explain both the acquisition and maintainance of phobias
- this states that phobias can be acquired by a process of classical conditioning and are then maintained by operant conditioning.
how are phobias acquired by classical conditioning?
classical conditioning of a phobia involves learning to associate one stimulus with another stimulus
- one stimulus initially creates no fear (NS) and the other already triggers a fear response (UCS)
- through association the NS becomes CS producing a CR of fear
how are phobias maintained by operant conditioning?
responses acquired by classical conditioning tend to decline over time (extinction) but phobias don’t becuase of operant conditioning
- the behaviour is reinforced which increases the frequency of the behaviour
Mowrer demonstrated this by conditioning a rat to develop an avoidance response to a shock - the rat was placed in a cage when the shocks were delivered
the rat could escape by learning to jump over a barrier
how are phobias socially learned?
Cook and Mineka (1989) suggested another mechanism - observational learning
- infant monkey watched adult monkeys displaying fear of a fear relevant stimuli such as toy snakes and acquired fear of those
- humans may acquire phobias in a similar way by imitating the fear responses modelled by others
what is a strength of the theory?
evidence from human and animal studies
- little albert has evidence for humans
- Mowrer’s study of rats and Cook and Mineka’s study of monkeys has evidence for animals
what is a weakness of the theory?
some phenomena associated with the acquisition of phobias cannot be explained by learning alone
- we easily acquire phobias of things that have been a source of danger in our evolutionary past e.g. the dark but not of other things such as guns
how can it be applied?
learning theory explanations for phobias have real world applications in therapies for phobias
- systematic desensitisation and flooding are based on classical conditioning as a way to treat phobias
- systematic desensitisation helps clients to learn new responses to the phobic stimulus whilst flooding works by extinction of learned fear responses
