Phobias

• Characterising Phobias

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  Behavioural

  Panic / Avoidance / Endurance (staying close)

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  Emotional

  Fear / Anxiety

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  Cognitive

  Selective Attention / Irrational Beliefs / Cognitive Distortions
• Explaining Phobias

  The behavioural approach suggests phobias are learnt through experiences.

  Two Process Model

  Classical Conditioning (Acquiring Phobias): Unconditioned stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus to produce a conditioned stimulus which elicits a conditioned response which is fear.

  Operant Conditioning (Maintaining Phobias): As the stimulus produces fear the person will avoid it. This leads to the phobia being maintained as it is never overcome.
• Evaluation

  RWA -> led to development of successful therapies such as systematic desensitisation and flooding.

  Research support -> Watson and Rayner conditioned Little Albert to fear a white rat by pairing out with a loud noise.

  Not all phobias are learnt from the environment.

  Fails to consider biology -> many phobias are due to adaptations like fear of heights and the dark.
• Treating Phobias -> Systematic Desensitisation

  A client and therapist build an anxiety hierarchy which gradually exposes the client to their phobic stimulus whilst they engage in breathing exercises. This aims to replace the faulty association between the CS and CR.

  Ethical Treatment

  Lang and Lazovik used SDS on a group of people with a snake phobia -> their phobic symptoms decreased

  May not be effective with evolutionary based phobias

  There are many practical issues with the treatment -> time consuming, expensive, can cause nausea with in vitro therapy
• Treating Phobias -> Flooding

  Intensive exposure to feared stimulus. Anxiety may be extremely high, eventually this will decrease and the client will be comfortable. This can be in vivo or in vitro.

  Practical -> time efficient + cost effective

  Wolpe put a patient with fear of cars into there back of a car and drove her around for 4 hours. By the end of the journey her phobia had disappeared

  Unethical -> can cause psychological harm to children or adults with learning difficulties

  Side effects like nausea from virtual reality and the phobia can be made worse