Social and Specific Phobia Flashcards
What are the symptoms of specific phobia?
- Marked fear/anxiety about a specific object or situation.
- The object/situation provokes immediate fear/anxiety.
- The object/situation is actively avoided or endured with intense fear/anxiety.
- The fear/anxiety is out of proportion with the actual threat, i.e. irrational.
What are the types of specific phobia?
- Animal type.
- Blood-injection-injury.
- Natural environment type.
- Situational type (e.g. airplanes, elevators, enclosed spaces, etc.).
- Other type (e.g. fear of situations leading to choking or vomiting, in children, phobia of clowns).
Why is blood-injection-injury phobia unique?
- Causes a pronounced vasovagal reaction.
- Unlike other phobias, with a pure sympathetic component, BII phobia comprises of a sympathetic component AND then a pronounced parasympathetic response, resulting in nausea, brachycardia (<60bps), and even fainting.
How can specific phobia be learned (both directly and vicariously)? What are the individual differences in learning?
- Öst and Hugdahl (1981)
- Sanderson et al. (1962)
- Askew & Field (2007)
- Cook and Mineka (1989)
Fear can be conditioned to neutral stimuli when paired with traumatic/painful events. This can be generalised to other stimuli.
- Öst and Hugdahl (1981): Survey of 106 adult phobic patients- 58% cited traumatic conditioning experience as the source of the phobia (however this leaves many who cannot cite an experience + many do not develop phobia from trauma).
- Sanderson et al. (1962): Subjects given injections of scoline, which produces temporary suspension of breathing, developed intense fears of the stimulus encountered in or connected with the experimental setting.
Vicarious Conditioning: Watching a phobic person behave fearfully to a phobic object can transmit the fear to the observer vicariously.
- Askew & Field (2007): 7-9 year old children, paired images of fearful facial expressions w/ images of unknown marsupial 10x conditioned more fear response than paired with happy facial expressions.
- Cook & Mineka (1989): Monkeys can be vicariously condiitoned to fear snakes, even if they watched a video tape rather than live monkeys.
Outline Mowrer’s Two-Factor Theory. What are its shortcomings?
This theory suggests that excessive fear is the result of a direct conditioning experience and its maintenance by avoidant behaviour. Avoidance prevents the aversive symptoms associated with the feared objects from occurring, thereby being reinforced operantly.
- In theory, exposure therapy puts an end to this negative reinforcement, leading to extinction of the fear.
The approach suffers from a few shortcomings:
- Fails to explain why specific fears are non-randomly distributed, e.g. fear of snakes more frequently associated with UCSs than electricity (Seligman, 1971).
- People do not always acquire phobic fears as a result of aversive confrontation (Saigh, 1984).
- Not all specific phobias can be traced back to a confrontation with a traumatic UCS. People can develop a fear response to a CS, although it has never been paired with a UCS (Wolpe et al. 1985).
- The avoidance implicated in the theory is active avoidance, whereas behaviour exhibited by phobics is passive avoidance (Seligman, 1971).
Outline individual differences in learning a phobia.
- Differences in life experience: For example, lifelong positive experiences with dogs followed by being bitten by a dog means the person is unlikely to develop a full-blown phobia.
- Familiarity: Seeing people behave non-fearfully can act as a protective factor.
-
Uncontrollable and unpredictable events are much more likely to condition a phobia.
- Mineka and Cook (1986): Monkeys raised with a sense of masery and control over their environment habituated to scary events faster than did naïve monkeys.
-
Inflation Effect: Experiences after the conditioning experience may affect the strength and maintenance of the conditioned fear, for example, a mild fear of driving following a minor crash may develop into a full-blown phobia if the person was physically assaulted afterwards.
- Iziquierdo et al. (2002): Fear responses to a conditioned stimulus are increased by the administration of corticosteroids as well as non-contingent unconditioned stressors.
- Verbal information received after the conditioning event is likely to alter interpretation of the dangerousness of that event, potentially inflating levels of fear.
- Constant cognitive preparedness for the phobic situation can maintain the phobia.
Outline the evolutionary preparedness explanation of specific phobia.
- Primates and humans seem to be evolutionarily prepared to rapidly associate certain objects, e.g. snakes, spiders, water, enclosed spaces, with frightening or unpleasant events.
- Fear of pain and injury is universal and protective.
- Overcomes the randomness limitation of the behavioural explanation.
- While not innate or inborn, they are easily acquired and resistant to extinction. Prepared phobias can be activated subliminally, helping to account for certain aspects of the irrationality of phobias. They may not be able to control their fear because the fear may arise from cognitive structures that are not under conscious control (Öhman & Mineka, 2001).
Evalute the evolutionary preparedness perspective.
-
Öhman et al. (1974) support: Extended preparedness theory to students, found that skin-conductance responses conditioned more easily and extinguished more slowly to “biologically-relevant” stimuli such as spiders and snakes, than to neutral stimuli such as houses, flowers, or geometric figures.
- However, cognitive theory can explain this through expectations arising from experience, instructions, and vicariant learning.
- When there is a strong expectation of covariation between two classes of events, people overestimate their contingency. In an experiment in which the aversive consequence distribution is the same, participants tend to report that the aversive stimulus occured more frequently when paired with the fear-relevant stimulus. Tomarken, Mineka & Cook (1989) demonstrated such a bias using an illusory correlation paradigm in high and low fear conditions. However, this expectation bias and evolutionary bias can coexist, with evolutionary biases being flexible enough to accomodate phylo and ontogenetically relevant stimuli- allowing the potential dangers of new stimuli to be learned quickly.
- However, cognitive theory can explain this through expectations arising from experience, instructions, and vicariant learning.
- Certain fears are frequently referred to as biologically prepared, e.g. spiders. But, <1% of spiders are dangerous to humans (Diaz, 2004). Howevr, mushrooms are not viewed as biologically relevant to fear, but poisonous ones are relatively common compared to spiders (Delprato, 1980).
- Evolutionary preparedness model can’t be tested, and is a circular argument.
What are potential biological causal factors in developing specific phobia?
- Genetic and temperamental variables affect the speed and strength of conditioning of fear (Oehlberg & Mineka, 2011).
- Londsforf et al (2009) found that carriers of the s allele of the serotonin-transporter gene show superior fear conditioning compared to individuals are not carriers.
- Genetic contribution varies on the subtype, highest heritability appears to be for specific phobia of animals, and blood-injection-injury, yet there is still very little research that can provide more conclusive results (van Houtem et al. 2013)
- Female MZ twins more likely to share animal phobias and situational phobias than DZ twins (Kendler et al, 1999). Heritability of animal phobias separate from the heritability of complex phobias such as social phobia and agoraphobia (Czajkowski et al. 2011).
How can exposure therapy help treat specific phobia? What is participant modelling?
- The best treatment for specific phobias- involves controlled exposure to the stimuli or situations that elicit phobic fear. Clients are gradually placed (symbolically or increasingly real life) in frightening situations. Most phobias respond robustly to in vivo exposure, but it is associated with high dropout rates and low treatment acceptance (Choy, Fyer, & Lipsitz, 2006).
- VRET: Parsons & Rizzo (2006) conducted a meta-analysis, concluding that VRET is associated with a significant decline of anxiety symptoms. Opris et al. (2012) concluded that the effect, for anxiety disorders in general, was comparable to that of in vivo therapy.
- Participant Modelling: Particularly effective variant. Here, the therapist calmly models ways of interacting with the phobic stimulus or situation. For certain therapies (small-animal phobia, flying phobia, claustrophobia, and BII), exposure therapy is highly effective when administered in one single long session (up to 3 hours
What are the criteria for social phobia? What are the two-sutypes?
- A. Marked fear or anxiety about social situations in which the individual is exposed to possible scrutiny by others.
- B. Individual fears that they will act in a way, or show anxiety symptoms, that will be negatively evaluated and lead to rejection or offence.
- C. Social situations almost always provoke fear or anxiety.
- D. Social situations avoided or endured with intense fear or anxiety.
- E. Fear or anxiety is out of proportion to the actual threat posed by the social situation and to the sociocultural context.
- Two subtypes, performance, and non-performance.
Outline social phobia as a learned behaviour.
Like other phobias, often seem to originate from either direct or vicarious classical conditioning.
- May experience social defeat or humiliation, or being or witness the target of anger or criticism. 92% of an adult sample reported a history of severe teasing in adulthood, compared to only 35% with OCD (McCabe et al. 2003).
- Social phobic people show especially robust conditioning of fear when the stimulus was socially relevant (critical facial expressions and verbal insults) as opposed to more nonspecific negative stimuli.
- 13% report vicarious conditioning experiences of some sort, 96% of these could link this socially traumatic experience to the specifics of their current phobia.
- People with social phobia may also be especially likely to have grown up with parents who were emotionally cold, socially isolated, avoidant, and devalued sociability.
Outline social phobia in an evolutionary context.
From an evolutionary perspective, social phobias are unusual in that they result from fear of one’s own species, rather than other species and environmental threats.
- Öhman et al (1985) proposed that social fears and phobias evolve as a by-product of dominance hierarchies. Submissive individuals rarely attempt to escape situations, explaining why people with social phobias prefer to endure social situations rather than leave.
- Humans have a predisposition to acquire fears of social stimuli that signal dominance and aggression (e.g. humans process angry facial expressions much more quickly than any others).
- People with social phobia show greater activation of the amygdala in response to negative facial expressions than do normal controls. This helps to explain the irrational quality of social phobia.
- Hyperactivity to negative facial expressions is paralleled by heightened neural responses to criticism (Shin & Liberzon, 2009).
How may perceptions of uncontrollability and unpredictability affect social phobia development?
Exposure to uncontrollable and unpredictable situations plays an important role in social phobia development. Perceptions of uncontrollability and unpredictability leads to submissive and unassertive behaviour. More likely if these perceptions stem from an actual social defeat (Mineka & Zinbarg, 1995). People with social phobia have a diminished sense of personal control in their own lives (Leung & Heimber, 1996).
How may cognitive biases maintain social phobia?
People with social phobia expect others to reject or negatively evaluate them. Leads to a sense of vulnerability around others, expect themselves to behave awkwardly and unacceptably, leading to preoccupation with bodily responses and stereotyping themselves with negative self-images. This preoccupation interferes with the ability to interact skilfully, resulting in a vicious cycle. People also tend to interpret ambiguous social information as negative rather than benign. This helps to maintain social phobia.
