behavioural approach to treating phobias

Cards (4)

  • systematic desensitisation
    • this treatment follows the belief that fear can be eliminated by associating the feared stimulus with a positive stimulus
    • this is difficult at first as anxiety is incompatible with positive moods
    • joseph wolpe developed a technique to overcome this by introducing the phobic to their feared situation gradually
  • counter-conditioning
    • phobias are often the result of a negative association or experience
    • the aim of systematic desensitisation is to get the patient to lose to learned association
    • may try to re-associate the fear with a positive experience (counter-conditioning)
    • patients are taught to use relaxation techniques when they experience fear, eg, breathing techniques
  • desensitisation hierarchy
    • patient and therapist construct a series of imagined scenarios involving the fear object - each one causing more anxiety than the previous one
    • patient then imagines each of the scenarios, while practicing the relaxation techniques
    • once relaxed imagining one scenario they move onto the next, until have total mastery over their fear.
  • flooding
    • one alternative to gradual exposure is flooding
    • still involves relaxation techniques beforehand, but involves one continued exposure to the feared stimuli - either in vivo or via virtual reality
    • as the adrenal response has a time limit, the ideas is that a new stimulus-response link can be learned when adrenaline levels decrease