phobias behavioural explanation

• Maintenance by operant conditioning:

  Phobias were maintained through operant conditioning, people who avoided their fear still have their phobia due to their behaviour being reinforced.
• Acquisition by classical conditioning: 

  Pavlov and Rayner 1920 induced a phobia into Little Albert through classical conditioning by making him associate what would be an object that he loved before going through this process to an object that he hated the presence of. By the end of the process he associated the objects with a loud noise which created a conditioned response of fear.
• strength exposure therapy. The distinctive element of the two-process model is the idea that phobias are maintained through the phobic stimulus. This is important in explaining why people with phobias benefit from being exposed to the phobic stimulus. Once the avoidance behaviour has been prevented it ceases to be reinforced by the experience of anxiety reduction and avoidance therefore declines. This shows the value of the two-process approach because it identified a means for treating phobias.
• limitation is that it does ot account for the cognitive aspects of phobias. Behavioural explanations such as the two-process model are geared towards explaining behaviour. Key behaviour is avoidance of the phobic stimulus. But we know phobias are not just avoidance behaviour, as there are cognitive aspects. People hold irrational beliefs of a phobic stimulus. The two-process model only explains avoidance behaviour but is inadequate for explaining phobia cognition. This means that the two-process model does not completely explain symptoms of phobias.
• strength is the link between bad experiences and phobias. Little Albert by Raynor and Watson 1920 frightening experience led to phobia of the stimuli included with the classical conditioning.Systematic evidence 2006 Jongh 73% dental fear faced a traumatic experience compared to the control group which 21% had faced a traumatic experience had low dental anxiety. This shows that the association between and an unconditioned response does lead to the development of a phobia.