phobias

• Watson & Rayner (1920) wanted to study the development of phobias and conducted a lab experiment with a 9 month old baby (Little Albert).

  At the start of the study, Albert showed no usual anxiety about various objects. He tried to play with a white rat when presented with it at the beginning.

  Whenever the white rat was presented to Albert, they made a loud noise by banging an iron bar close to Albert's ear. Albert began to display fear when he saw the rat (NS).
• They showed that the CS (rat) could be generalised to similar objects when they showed him other white fluffy objects. Albert showed distress at all of these. His phobia had become generalised.

  
  

  However, today the experiment would not take place due to ethical guidelines and the psychological harm the child was put under, which means its relevance to today's society must be evaluated.
• Watson and Rayner's study is research evidence that supports the idea that some phobias develop and are maintained by classical and operant conditioning.
• A limitation is that the behaviourist approach overlooks the role of cognition. This is an issue because irrational thinking seems to be a key feature of phobias.

  Tomarken et al presented a series of slides of snakes and neutral images to phobic and non-phobic participants. Phobic participants tended to overestimate the number of snake images presented.
• Therefore, the cognitive approach would argue that the thinking processes that occur between a stimulus and a response are responsible for the emotion component of the response.

  This presents a weakness for the behaviourist approach as it seems that the cognitive approach would be more appropriate in explaining phobias and patients may benefit from cognitive therapies that try to discredit some of their irrational thoughts.
• Seligman (1970) suggests that humans have a biological preparedness to develop certain phobias rather than others because they were adaptive in our evolutionary past.

  For example, those who avoided snakes and high places would be more likely to survive long enough and pass on their genes than those who did not.
• This theory is further supported by Ost and Hugdahl who claim that nearly half of all people with phobias have never had any anxious experience with the phobic stimulus and some have had no experience.

  This undermines the behavioural approach to explaining phobias because it suggests that there are other factors involved other than conditioning which lead to acquiring a phobia.
• The behavioural approach is more useful for explaining individual phobias unique to individual experience but it does not explain why human beings in general share certain fears/ anxieties around specific things.
• The two process model has good explanatory power as it explains how phobias could be maintained over time.

  This is a strength because it has important implications for therapies such as flooding and desensitisation as it explains why patients need to be exposed to the feared stimulus. Once a patient is prevented from practising their avoidance behaviour, the behaviour ceases to be reinforced and so it declines.

  And so the model has good external validity as it is supported by successful therapies which treat phobias.