Phobia A03

• Study refuting operant conditioning:

  research from Mowrer and  Lamoreaux(1946), who showed that rats would develop an avoidance response to an electric shock, using animals in research is a weakness as their results cannot be generalised to human behaviours since humans and rats have different cognitive abilities and emotional complexities and therefore will perform differently as humans may not be as avoidant as rats
• Strength study Of operant:supporting research from 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. This strengthens OC as an explanation of maintaining phobias since positive punishment of electrical shocks caused the mice to avoid the shocks, this maintains the phobia through negative reinforcement. This proves that OC maintains phobias through the strengthening of an avoidant behaviour.  
• Supporting research for the acquisition of a phobia through SLT:

  by Cook and Mineka did a study on a group of ppt monkeys who had been raised in captivity/did not initially show fear of snakes.  The monkeys were shown video of other monkeys showing fear of a snake and a huge toy snake but not of other stimuli. Next they exposed the monkeys to toy snakes and the 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. 
• Refuting SLT

  Evidence from 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 heratability rates regarding specific phobia’s.they found the heratability was seen to be between 0-71%.
• refuting CC 

  treatment based on systematic desensitization, 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 in Watson and Rayner’s study in which it took just two sessions to condition an emotional response (CR) to a neutral stimulus of the rat, by pairing an UCS of a loud noise and UCR of fear, therefore demonstrating fear was learned through classical conditioning. This supports the theory that classical conditioning can cause a fear response to be learned by association, meaning that the theory of classical conditioning explaining how phobias as learned through association has high validity.