phobias

• what are phobias?

  • anxiety disorders
  • a fear becomes a phobia when it negatively impacts on a person's everyday life
• what are social phobias?

  • fear of humiliation in public places (fearing public toilets, speaking or restaurants)
  • they fear someone will see them expressing their fear and as a result will avoid certain activities or situations
• specific phobias

  • fear of a specific object or situation
  • arachnaphobia - fear of spiders
  • claustraphobia - fear of small spaces
• agoraphobia

  • fear of public places (shops, busy streets)
  • begins with panic attacks
  • as a result they fear panic attacks in a place they don't feel safe
  • unlike social phobias, they fear themselves not others watching them
• outline the behavioural characteristics of phobias

  • panic - crying, screaming, fight or flight
  • avoidance - effort to keep away from the phobic stimulus making daily life difficult
  • endurance - in unavoidable situations, extreme anxiety will be experienced (on a flight)
• outline the emotional characteristics of phobias


  -the emotional response to fear

  • anxiety - unpleasant state of high arousal
  • can be long term
  • immediate fear
  • prevents sufferer from relaxing
• Outline the cognitive characteristics of phobias

  • struggle to concentrate on anything else
  • irrational thought processes cause pressure
  • person kows their fear is excessive
  • disorted perception of the appearance (spiders look disgusting)
• behavioural approach to explaining phobias - classical conditioning

  • classical conditoning - associate something we initiallt don't fear (NS) with something we fear (UCS)
  • Little Albert created a phobia - whenever rat was presented, there was a loud noise
  • noise (UCS) creating UCR of fear, rat was NS and became associated with fear. rat became learned CS and produced a CR
• behavioural approach to explaining phobias - operant conditioning 


  • occurs when our behaviour is reinforced (rewarded or punished)
  • increases the frequencyof a behaviour
  • when we avoid a phobic stimulus we successfully escape the fear which reinforceds the avoidance behaviour and the phobia is maintained
• behavioural approach to phobias strengths

  • explains the role of CC in the development of phobias. people with phobias recall specific incidents when the phobia appeared (bitten by a dog)
• behavioural approach to phobias limitations

  • ignores cognitive andf emotional contributions to the development of psychopathology (irrational thinking)
  • only explains behaviour through learning experiences (nurture) and has no role for genetics (nature)
  • SELIGMAN (1971) - biological prepardeness - we're biologically prepared to learn associations between stimuli - fear for survival