Phobias

• phobias: a group of mental disorders characterised by excessive and/or irrational anxiety towards a particular stimulus. These interfere with everyday life and can be triggered or learned.
• agoraphobia: fear of being in public places where escape is difficult or where help is not available.
• social phobias: fear of being judged by others, fear of embarrassment, fear of being humiliated.
• specific phobias: fear of specific objects or situations that are often not dangerous (spiders, heights, seeing holes or blood etc).
• emotional characteristics of phobias are excessive, irrational fears and feelings of panic and anxiety. These feelings are cued by the anticipation or exposure to a phobic stimulus.
• behavioural characteristics of phobias are avoidance of a feared situation or freezing/fainting. often an immediate response to a feared situation or object is to attempt to avoid it, however, a stress response - fight or flight - kicks in causing the person to freeze or faint. avoidance causes interference with a person’s everyday life, making it a phobia rather than just a fear.
• Cognitive characteristics of phobias relate to thought processes. A defining thought of phobias is their irrationality - the fear is not based on any real danger and the fear will not stop even if logic is applied, eg a person is phobic to flying but they know that flying is safe.
• The behavioural approach to explaining phobias: the behaviourist approach suggests that phobias are learned through classical conditioning and maintained by operant conditioning in the two-process model.
• Initiation of a phobia: acquired through association between a neutral stimulus, and an unconditioned stimulus being repeatedly paired, leading to the conditioned response of fear and the phobia as a conditioned stimulus.
• Evidence of research for the behaviourist approach to phobias?

  John watson - Little Albert study
• maintaining a phobia: avoidance is negatively reinforced. operant conditioning - behaviour more likely to be repeated if the outcome is rewarding, avoidance of a phobic stimulus reduces the unpleasant feeling (fear) thus negatively reinforcing the behaviour.
• social learning and phobias: phobias may be learned by imitating the behaviour of others, eg a parent with an extreme fear of spiders could cause a child to also develop the fear because the behaviour appears rewarding (attention).
• Strength of social learning and phobias

  -research support

  -Bandura and Rosenthal - a model acted in pain every time a buzzer sounded, ppts that observed this showed an emotional response to the buzzer

  -shows that fears can develop by modelling
• limitation of phobia explanation

  -incomplete explanation.

  -a neutral stimulus associated with a feared experience should result in a phobia, but this is not always true eg not everyone who is bitten by a dog (fearful experience) develops a phobia.

  -Diathesis stress model: people inherit genetic vulnerabilities to developing disorders, and phobias are triggered by a life event.

  -the explanation is incomplete as it suggests only people with genetic vulnerability can acquire phobias.
• limitation of phobia Explanation

  -two-process model ignores cognitive factors

  -there are cognitive aspects to phobias that cannot be explained by behaviourism. Phobias can develop by irrational thinking, eg potential dangers in a perfectly safe situation.

  -alternative explanation: cognitive approach and CBT more successful in treating phobias than behaviourist.
• strength of phobia explanation

  -two process model supported by research

  -people with phobias recall a specific moment where they acquired their phobia, eg panic attack in a social setting (Sue et al).

  -However such traumatic incident can also be forgotten; different phobias can have different origins.

  -demonstrates the importance of classical conditioning, however other factors need to be considered in their maintenance.