Psychopathology Lessons 5-7 (Phobias) Flashcards
What is a phobia?
A mental disorder characterised by high levels of anxiety in response to a particular stimulus
What are 3 behavioural characteristics of phobias? (actions)
Avoidance and Disruption of functioning
Endurance (freeze/faint)
Panic
What is Avoidance and Disruption of functioning?
Avoidance is where a person’s response to their phobia is to evade it at all costs. This can often interfere with the person’s ability to function adequately for example at school or in the workplace.
What is Endurance?
When a person is stressed, their normal bodily response is fight or flight. However, when faced with their phobia, their bodily response is freeze or faint:
Freeze - so the phobia may think that the person is dead so may leave them alone
Faint - so scared so pass out
What is Panic?
In the presence of the phobia, the individual may show behavioural characteristics like crying, sweating, screaming or running away as a result of panicking.
What are 3 emotional characteristics of phobias?
Fear
Anxiety
Emotions (general)
What is Fear?
This is where an individual will feel persistent and excessive worry and distress towards a stimulus (their phobia).
What is Anxiety?
Where an individual feels apprehensive and uncertain about what is going to happen when they encounter their phobia.
What are emotions (general)?
The individual would experience strong emotions that are out of proportion to the actual danger that is posed (the phobia) e.g. screaming uncontrollably at a tiny spider far away.
What are the 4 cognitive characteristics of phobias?
Irrational
Insight
Cognitive distortions
Selective attention
What is Irrationality?
Resisting rational arguments about their phobia. For example, a person with the fear of flying will not listen to the fact that ‘flying is the safest form of transportation’.
What is insight?
Knowing and being very aware that their fear is unreasonable but still being terribly frightened of it.
What are cognitive distortions?
When an individual has a distorted perception of their phobia and it in an unusually negative way. For example, a person with arachnophobia may believe that spiders are deadly, dangerous and venomous, even when no spiders in the UK are actually deadly.
What is Selective Attention?
When an individual cannot look away from their phobia and focus all their attention onto it. They ignore everything else around them and just focus on the phobic situation.
What is the behavioural approach with relevance to phobias?
The behavioural approach suggests that ALL behaviour can be learnt (including phobias)
Who developed the two process model?
Mowrer
What is the two process model?
A theory which suggests that phobias are initiated and learnt through classical conditioning or by social learning and that phobias are maintained through operant conditioning.
A theory which suggests that phobias are:
1 initiated and learnt through classical conditioning or social learning
2 maintained through operant conditioning
What is classical conditioning? How does it relate to phobias?
Classical Conditioning is a method of learning through association between two different stimuli.
Perhaps phobias develop because of a stimulus, which a person is afraid of, becomes associated with another stimulus.
Who studied classical conditioning on Little Albert and when?
Watson and Rayner (1920)
Describe Watson and Rayner’s study on Classical Conditioning:
Watson and Rayner managed to give an 11 month year old boy, known as ‘Little Albert’, a phobia of rats through the use of Classical Conditioning.
- Initially, the presentation of the white rat (neutral stimulus) to Little Albert evoked no specific response where he was actually keen to play with it.
- Then, a loud banging noise (unconditioned stimulus) was presented to Little Albert which evoked an emotional response where he was startled and began to cry.
- Watson and Rayner then paired the white rat and the loud banging noise together 6 times until classical conditioning took place.
- When the white rat (conditioned stimulus) was presented to Little Albert again on its own, an emotional, conditioned response occurred due to an association built up between the white rat and the loud banging noise
- Little Albert developed a phobia for white rats where generalisations occurred too - Little Albert was also afraid of anything white or fluffy.
How could Little Albert have been reconditioned?
Pair the white rat with nice sounds or laughter to make him like the rat once again
What is the neutral, unconditioned and conditioned stimulus in the experiment and what does that mean?
Neutral - white rat - produces no reflexes or specific response
Unconditioned - loud banging noise - produces the reflex of fear (do not have to learn anything here - born with certain reflexes)
Conditioned - white rat after association - produces fear after learning
What are 3 weaknesses of Classical Conditioning?
1 Classical Conditioning can’t explain how ALL phobias are developed:
- not all traumatic experiences result in phobias being developed (someone in a car crash won’t necessarily develop a phobia for driving)
- not all phobias stem from traumatic experiences (might fear snakes or spiders because they look scary)
2 The study on Little Albert is unreliable as the findings have not been repeated as it was only conducted once
3 Learning doesn’t cause phobias to be developed
- The psychologist Menzies discovered that only 2% of people who had the phobia of water (hydrophobia) had encountered a traumatic experience with it (people had not learnt their phobia due to classical conditioning)
What is Social Learning?
Social Learning is a method of observational learning where typically young children observe a reaction from their parents in a particular situation and copy their behaviour. For example, if a child sees their parent respond to a spider by screaming, the child may copy their behaviour of screaming and eventually develop a phobia for spiders.