Essasy

    Cards (13)

    • The acquisition of phobias - classical conditioning. A stimulus that naturally produces a fear response is an ucs and the fear response is the unconditioned response. When the unconditioned stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus, which doesn’t elicit a response to the unconditioned response. After pairing the unconditioned stimulus with the neutral stimulus a certain amount of times association between the unconditioned fear response and the neutral stimulus is learned. This leads the neutral stimuls to become a conditioned stimuls producing the conditioned response of fear.
    • A strength of classical conditioning is the research by Watson and Rayners who managed to create a phobia in a baby boy through creating a fear response in a neutral stimulus. They did this by paring a natural stimuls prof a white rat with an unconditioned stimulus of a loud noise of a steel bar being struck. The striking of the steel bar naturally caused an unconditioned response of fear so when this was repeatedly paired with the white rat it caused little Albert to become afraid of the white rat which then became a cs which on its own then produced the unconditioned response of fear.
    • acquisition using STL by imitation of another person’s phobia & maintenance through observing acquisition and maintenance of phobia. a model will be paid attention to, as they may be familiar to the person, they repeatedly see phobic response, so they retain it in their memory, the person feels they can replicate fear response so they replicate phobia and may feel motivated to imitate phobia due to vicarious or direct reinforcement.it is vicariously reinforced if model received attention when phobia is shown,could be directly reinforced if they are given attention if they show signs of phobia
    • Cook and Mineka did a study on a group of ppt monkeys who had been raised in captivity and did not initially show fear of snakes.  The ppt monkeys were shown video of other monkeys showing fear of a live snake and a huge toy snake but not of other stimuli.  
      Next, they exposed the ppt monkeys to toy snakes and the ppt monkeys then showed a fear of the toy snakes after watching the video but had not shown fear previously. It was found that the ppt monkeys did learn a fear of snakes by watching the model monkeys showing fear to snakes on a video.  
        
    • For example, Van houten et al. (2013) twin studies suggests that genetic factors contribute to the risk of developing a fear or a phobia. This meta analysis looked at 10 twin studies that looked at heritability rates regarding specific phobia’s. They found the heritability was seen to be between 0-71%
       
    • Gray found that there is a link between personality and avoidance behaviour.
      This is a limitation of OC as Gray suggests negative reinforcement may not apply to everybody when it comes to negative reinforcement and maintaining  a phobia.  This is because it maybe more about personality and how sensitive a person is as to why they will avoid a situation where their phobia is present.
    • This is supported by Mowrer and Lamoreaux(1946), who showed that rats would develop an avoidance response to an electric shock. The rat was placed in a cage and a mild electric shock was delivered. The rat could escape the shock by jumping over a barrier. Therefore, the behaviour of escaping by jumping over the barrier was negatively reinforcing the avoidant behaviour.  
    • However, treatment based on systematic desensitisation, based on the principles of CC, doesn’t work for everyone because in Capafons et al 10% of the ppts did not improve their fear of flying.   
    • This is supported by, Bandura who found that children who were exposed to an aggressive role model were more likely to imitate aggression and non-imitative aggression than those children who did not ( No aggressive action was shown in 70% of cases when those children had an non-aggressive role model or were in the control group).  Also boys were more likely to imitate aggression shown by a same sex model.
    • Kindler et al (2015) showed identical twins are more similar in their aggression levels than non-identical twins
      This challenges social learning theory as identical twins showed greater similarity in aggression compared to non identical twins, which suggests that genetic factors can also predict potential behaviour rather than learning from observation in the environment.
       
    • The Motivation stage of SLT is supported by research. For example, Bandura (1965) showed that children once all children were offered a direct reward of a sticker or juice for every aggressive act all children displayed aggressive behaviour regardless if they had a model punched, rewarded or no consequences.
    • One weakness of classical conditioning is pavlov’s (1927) refuting research. Pavlov found that a behavior can be learnt when associated with a new stimuli. In his study, Pavlov discovered that p salivation (UCS) can become associated with a buzzer (NS) when paired together. This leads to the NS becoming the CS which causes the CR (salivation).
    • For example, Skinner showed how positive reinforcement worked by placing a hungry rat in his Skinner box. The box contained a lever on the side, and as the rat moved about the box, it would accidentally knock the lever. Immediately, it did so that a food pellet would drop into a container next to the lever. After being put in the box a few times, the rats quickly learned to go straight to the lever. The consequence of receiving food if they pressed the lever ensured that they would repeat the action again and again.