Behaviorism (area)

• Defining principles and concepts - we are born blank slates and learning occurs from the environment (conditioning)
• Main research methods - observation, experiment, animal studies
• Justification for these methods - you can see the conditioning occuring without being subjective (observation) animals are used to observe the conditioning in full can use the same animal in the future (animal studies)
• Key research - pavlov (dog), watson and raynor (little albert), skinner (pigeons), bandura (role models)
• Strength one - highly scientific as it allows objective, controlled experiments to take place which can demonstrate cause and effect
• Strength two - it supports the nuture side of the nature and nurture debate - shows the influence of environment on human behaviour
• Weakness one - low ecological validity because of the controlled environment so may not be true to life
• Weakness two - underestimates the effect of nature in the nature and nuture debate e.g. the role of genetics in behaviour
• Application - systematic desensitisation - a common mental health problem is specific phobias, in the uk 7% of the population are sufferers.
• Specific phobias can prevent people from leading normal lives as they avoid public places where they may encounter the phobia.
• Systematic desensitisation, a treatment based on classical conditioning principles, is used to treat specific phobias.
• In systematic desensitisation, patients construct a graded hierarchy of fear from the most fearful thing, such as a spider crawling on them, to the least, a picture of a spider.
• Relaxation exercises are used in systematic desensitisation to pair the object with calmness, creating a stimulus response of spider to calmness, which treats the phobia.