Behavioural explanation

• A phobia is an irrational fear of an object or situation, it’s a type of anxiety disorder and produces a conscious avoidance of feared thing
• characteristics

  Behavioural- panic, avoidance, endurance

  Emotional- anxiety, fear, unreasonable, responses

  Cognitive- selective attention, irrational beliefs, cognitive distortions
• behaviourist explanation

  All behaviour is learnt, so phobias are learnt

  two process model, acquire phobia through classical conditioning and maintain phobia with operant conditioning

  Classical conditioning- traumatic experience with dog means dog is now associated with fear

  Operant conditioning- avoid dog and rewarded with no anxiety, negative reinforcement
• The strength of the behavioural explanation, real world application in exposure therapies

  The two process model is the idea that phobias are maintained by avoidance of the phobic stimulus.

  This helps explain why people with phobias benefit from being exposed to the phobic stimulus

  When avoidance behaviour is prevented, it can’t be reinforced by the experience of anxiety reduction so avoidance declines
• One limitation of the two process model is that it does not account for cognitive aspects of phobias

  it explains behaviour, in the case of phobias the key behaviour is avoidance, however, we know that phobias is not simply avoidance responses. They also have a significant cognitive component.

  this means the two process model is not a complete explanation of the symptoms of phobias
• The strength of the two process model is support for link between bad experience and phobia

  Little Albert study shows how bad experience involving a stimulus can lead to a phobia of that stimulus

  study found 73% of people with a fear of dentistry had experienced a traumatic experience linked to dentistry

  confirms that association between stimulus and unconditioned response leads to development of phobia

  However, not all phobias stem from a bad experience. Common phobias, like snake phobias occur in populations, were very few people have any experiences of snakes, association isn’t strong