acquisition and maintenance of phobias

• o   A phobia is an anxiety disorder, which interferes with daily living.

  o   It is an instance of irrational fear that produces a conscious avoidance of the feared object or situation.

  o   As well as a restricted day-to-day life, it can also cause a lot of distress.

  o   They are more pronounced than fears. You can be afraid of something, but as long as you can function normally even if the object is there, you don’t have a phobia.

  o   Mowrer (1960) suggested phobias are more likely to be acquired through classical conditioning but maintained through operant conditioning.
• Classical conditioning


  Associating a NS (object/animal) with an UCS (bad experience), leads to CR (extreme fear)
• UCS


  Unconditioned stimulus that produces a strong emotional reaction (fear)
• NS


  Neutral stimulus that becomes associated with the UCS
• CR

  Conditioned response (extreme fear)
• Producing a phobia

  1. UCS that produces a strong emotional reaction (fear)

  2. Situation where UCS can become associated with a NS
• Being bitten

  UCS that produces pain (UCR)
• Classical conditioning process

  1. Bitten (UCS) + dog (NS) = pain (UCR)

  2. Dog (CS) = pain (CR) – which we fear and would like to avoid
• Fear response becomes generalised


  Person becomes anxious every time they saw a dog, resulting in a phobia
• Reinforcement (positive or negative) – an individual gets attention when they show fear. This reinforces the behaviour and therefore leads to the development and maintenance of a phobia. When someone with a conditioned phobia responds by avoiding the fear-provoking stimulus, their anxiety reduces. Therefore, this provides negative reinforcement for this avoidance behaviour (negative reinforcement increases the frequency of behaviour occurring).
• For example, if someone learned to fear dogs through classical conditioning after being bitten by a dog, they will avoid going to parks where dogs might be present. Every time they walk around the park to avoid the dogs their anxiety (unpleasant stimulus) is removed (negative reinforcement). Therefore, further avoidance of situations where a dog might be encountered is repeated.
• A strength is evidence from human and animal studies for the role of conditioning and social learning in the acquisition of phobias. Evidence for the acquisition of fear responses in humans comes from the Watson and Rayner study of little albert which demonstrated that the mechanisms of classical conditioning could easily condition a fear of rats. Also Cook and Mineka demonstrated that fear of animals could be learned through observation in infant rhesus monkeys. Therefore, this suggests that, even if learning is not a complete explanation for phobias, it does take place.
• A weakness is that some phenomena associated with the acquisition of phobias cannot be explained by learning alone. We easily acquire phobias of things that have been a source of danger in out evolutionary past, such as a fear of snakes or the dark, but not of other dangerous things like cars or guns despite the fact that these are far more hazardous. Also, some people acquire phobias without conditioning experiences or modelling. This is important because it shows that learning is not a complete explanation for the acquisition of phobias.