AO1 Explaining Phobias

• what is a phobia?

  a persistent anxiety disorder, which is an irrational and/or disproportionate fear which interferes and disrupts with daily life as the person will try to avoid the object/situation/activity
• what are the DSM-5 categories of phobias?

  • specific phobia - phobia of an object, such as an animal or body part, or a situation such as flying
  • social anxiety (social phobia) - phobia of a social situation such as public speaking or using a public toilet
  • agoraphobia - phobia of being outside or on a public place
• what are the behavioural traits of having a phobia?

  • panic, avoidance or endurance of phobia stimulus
  • panic - crying, swearing, maybe freezing
  • avoidance - disrupting your life in order to avoid phobia stimulus
  • endurance - choosing to remain with phobic stimulus but being very wary of it (can include freeze response)
• what are emotional traits of having a phobia?

  • anxiety - sufferer may not experience positive emotion/may have a high state of unpleasant arousal
  • fear - more unpleasant direct, and immediate form of anxiety, intense and short-lived
  • disproportionate/unreasonable levels
• what are cognitive traits of having a phobia?

  • selective attention - struggle to concentrate or even notice something else as they are so transfixed on phobic stimulus
  • irrational beliefs - sufferer won't be able to think rationally about phobic stimulus, increasing pressure on their reaction
  • cognitive distortion - sufferer will not see reality, genuinely perceiving something as bad in some way because of their phobia
• what is the initiation of the phobia caused by?

  classical conditioning - learning through association
• what is extinction?

  • gradual weakening of a conditioning response that results in behaviour decreasing or disappearing, this happens when a conditioned stimulus is no longer paired with an unconditioned stimulus
• what is stimulus generalisation?

  a tendency for the conditioned stimulus to evoke similar responses after the response has been conditioned
• who proposed the two-process model?

  Mowrer (1947) - proposed to explain how phobias are learnt and maintained

  • acquisition by - classical conditioning
  • maintained by - operant conditioning
• how are phobias maintained?

  • when the likelihood of a behaviour being repeated is increased if the outcome is reinforced (rewarded)
  • sufferers behaviour is negatively reinforced when they avoid the situation where the phobic object may be encountered
  • this reduction in fear is a desirable consequence and so reinforces the avoidance behaviour and the phobia is maintained
• how is social learning theory connected to phobias?

  • you model behaviours of others - someone is scared of a spider, and gets attention, so you model it as you see a 'reward'
  • you model behaviour of others - someone gets attention for not making a fuss of something e.g. giving blood and you see it as a 'reward' so you copy it