AO3

• Strength - Good explanatory power - people with phobias often recall a specific incident when their phobia first appeared (e.g. being bitten by a dog and developing a fear of dogs) (Sue et al)
• Real life application - Classical conditioning is used within the one of the treatment methods— systematic desensitisation—and so shows that it has a practical use.
• Weakness – cannot explain people who cannot recall a traumatic incident with phobia – a better explanation is biological preparedness: Martin Seligman (1970) argued that humans and animals are genetically programmed to rapidly learn an association between potentially life-threatening stimuli and fear. For example Bregman (1934) failed to condition a fear response in infants aged 8 to 16 months by pairing a loud bell with wooden blocks = suggests there is more to acquiring phobias then just conditioning
• Weakness - Ignores cognitive factors for example the role of irrational thinking. CBT that challenges irrational thinking has been very successful when treating phobias (Engles et al) = thus behavioural explanation for phobias is a reductionist approach