Phobias

• What is a phobia?

  An anxiety disorder, and is an extreme, irrational reaction to an object or a situation.
• What are the categories of phobias?

  - specific phobias

  
  

  - social anxiety (social phobia)

  
  

  - agoraphobia (fear of outside spaces without the ability to escape)
• What are the behavioural characteristics of a phobia?

  - Panic (crying, screaming running away etc.)

  
  

  - Avoidance (conscious effort to get away from fear)

  
  

  - Endurance (opposite to avoidance, person may stay in the room with phobia to keep an eye on it)
• What are the emotional characteristics of phobias

  - Anxiety ( unpleasant state of high arousal)

  - Fear

  - Emotional response is irrational
• What are the cognitive characteristics of phobias

  - Selective attention (difficult to look away from phobic stimuli)

  
  

  - Irrational beliefs (thoughts about phobia that have no basis in reality)

  
  

  - Cognitive distortions ( inaccurate/ unrealistic perception)
• What do you think can cause phobias?

  - faulty cognitions

  
  

  - chemical imbalance in the brain

  
  

  - learned behaviour (e.g. negative reinforcement)

  
  

  - associations between stimuli ( classical conditioning)
• Behaviourist explanation of phobias

  The behaviourist explanation suggest that phobias and other behaviours are learnt through classical and operant conditioning.
• Mowrer (1960)


  Proposed the two-process model based on the behavioural approach to phobias

  
  

  1. Phobias are acquired through classical conditioning

  2. Phobias are then maintained through operant conditioning
• Research demonstrating acquisition of phobia

  Watson and Rayner (1920)'s little abert study

  
  

  UCS- the noise

  UCR- fear

  NS- rat paired with UCS - noise

  REPEATED

  CS- rat

  CR- fear of rat
• Maintaining phobia happening through operant condition

  Negative Reinforcement occurs when an individual avoids a situation that is unpleasant, therefore increasing the behaviour
• Seligman 1971


  Humans have a biological preparedness to develop certain phobias rather than others because they were adaptive (i.e. helpful) in our evolutionary past
• Systematic Desensitisation

  treatment designed to gradually expose an individual to a phobic stimuli to reduce anxiety- using the principles of classical conditioning
• Joseph Wolpe (1958)


  developed the technique of SD, gradually exposing individuals to stimuli
• 3 Processes involved in SD

  Relaxation

  Anxiety Hierarchy

  Exposure
• Menzies and Clarke (1993) on SD

  in vivo (real life) techniques on SD are more successful than in vitro
• Relaxation

  An individual is taught relaxation techniques e.g. breathing techniques, muscle relaxation strategies or mental imagery techniques
• Anxiety Hierarchy

  After learning, you develop a fear hierarchy for the phobia and rank it from levels 1-10
• Exposure

  Exposing patient to phobic stimuli
• Flooding

  Exposing people with a phobia to their phobic stimuli without gradual build up
• How does flooding work?

  Classical conditioning called extinction

  
  

  Not allowing the patient to avoid their phobia- the aim is to show the patient that their phobia is harmless (stopping phobic responses quickly)
• Counter conditioning

  When a phobic stimuli is paired with relaxation instead of anxiety, allowing the individual to learn a new response
• Reciprocal inhibition

  According to SD, two emotional states cannot exist the same time
• What happens if the therapist allows the client out too early?

  They run the risk of reinforcing the phobia as the client would have successfully managed to avoid the phobic stimuli
• Jongh et al (2006)


  found that 73% of people fear of dental treatment had a traumatic experience
• DiNardo (1990)


  individuals can have no recollection of previous traumatic experience
• Diathesis stress model

  This model proposes that people develop psychological disorders when they possess both an inherited or constitutional predispositions (diathesis) and are exposed to stressful events.