Behavioural Treatments

• Systematic Desensitisation

  • relaxation - patient taught to relax through techniques like breathing exercises or visualisation which reduces activity of the sympathetic nervous system
  • anxiety hierarchy - patient and therapist work together to create a system of arranging things in order of fear intensity
  • gradual exposure - patient is exposed to the phobic stimulus over a number of sessions, working through the hierarchy making sure they are relaxed at every stage
  • typically, 4-6 sessions, 12 if the phobia is severe
• Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

  • virtual reality exposure therapy - another form of systematic desensitisation
• Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

  • McGrath (1990) - 75% of patients with phobias respond to DS
  • Choy (2007) - VERT techniques seemed to be more effective than the ones that just used pictures
  • Others have found that vivo modelling (watching someone else coping well with the phobic stimulus) is effective (Corner)
  • Ohman (1975) - SD is only effective in treating specific learned phobias from personal experience
• Flooding

  • a person with a phobias is immersed in the experience in one long sessions
  • the sessions continues until the anxiety has disappeared
  • they are taught self-relaxation techniques beforehand
• How does flooding relate to classical conditioning?

  • the learned association between the phobic stimulus and response decreases through continuous exposure without harmful consequences (extinction)
  • a person's fear response (and release of adrenaline underlying this) has a time limit
  • as adrenaline levels naturally decrease, a new stimulus-response link can be learned, the fear stimulus is now associated with a non-anxious response
• Strengths and Weaknesses of Behavioural Therapies

  • symptom substitution as the phobia is not behavioural but unconscious to begin with; therefore, another phobia will take place of it
  • evidence for symptom substitution is mixed and behavioural therapists tend to believe it doesn't happen at all
  • behavioural therapies are faster and cheaper and require less thought than talking therapies and therefore may be more suitable for people with learning difficulties
  • could use anti-anxiety drugs instead of behavioural and talking therapies