behavioural approach for phobias

• • classical conditioning
  • This is how a phobia is initiated through association
  • starts with a ucs (a feared stimulus) eg. a loud noise this produces an unconditioned response of fear.
  • A neutral stimulus becomes associated with the ucs when they are present at the same time
  • NS becomes a conditioned stimulus and produces the same fear repsonse, even without the presence of the UCS
• Study little albert-

  • show that he could be conditioned to have a fear of rats
  • when he had previously shown no fear around them
  • Using steel bar to create a loud noise whenever he reached out to touch the rat
• Two process model

  • This model suggests that phobias are learned through association (classical conditioning) and maintained through avoidance behaviors (operant conditioning
• Operant conditioning

  • managing to avoid the feared thing or situation acts as negative reinforcement as it takes away the unpleasent feeling of fear associated with it.
  • THis strengthens the avoidance behaviour-more likely to repeat This is how a phobia is maintained
• social learning theory

   - phobias may be acquired through modelling the behavior of others.

  • Eg seeing a parent respond to a spider with an extreme reaction may lead them to a similar behaviour because fearful person gets attention which seems rewarding
• One strength of the behaviourist approach is that there is evidence that it has led to the development of successful therapies. For example systematic desensetisation The method uses counterconditioning to get the patient to learn a new response of relaxation in the presence of their feared stimulus. (mcgrath) found a 75% success rate for patients using sd. Because this is based on the principle of classical conditioning the effectiveness of this therapy strongly suggests there is a link between behavioural factors and phobias , supporting the validity of this theory

  + counter However it doesn't help 25% of people therefore phobias can't be completely attributed to behavioural factors
• • .Some phobias don’t follow a traumatic experience, for example a person may have a fear of snakes without ever having encountered a snake. This suggests some phobias have not been acquired through learning, weakening this explanation( something which could be explained through concept of biological preparedeness)seligman which suggests we are programmed to rapidly learn associations between fear and stimuli which would have been dangerous or life threatening in our evolutionary past (for example spiders or snakes) . Explaining why we are more likely to develop fears like spiders This suggests that the BH can't explain all phobias
• The behavioural approach can be described as reductionst. This is because it reduces complex behaviour down just to a stimulus response link. This can be beneficial because focusing on one aspect (stimulus-response) can allow a specific cause of behaviour to be identified and treatements developed to address this cause (eg. systematic desensiation) However, it can be a problem because other factors may be ignored (such as cogntiive and biological factors/environmental ) and preventing more realistic/valid explanations of behaviour and as a result, patients may be prevented from receiving more effective therapies. (engels- a social phobia responds better to CBT. )Therefore a more holistic theory is required as the biological approach only provides a partial explanation for human behaviour.