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Treatment of Phobias - Coggle Diagram
Treatment of Phobias
Explanations for Phobias
Operant Conditioning
- Once a stimulus - anxiety association (CC) has been establish it is maintained through operant conditioning.
- If phobia behaviours are positively reinforced through increased attention, they may be repeated.
- The avoidance of, or escape from, the phobic stimulus reduces fear and is thus reinforcing (Negative - the removal of an unpleasant stimulus).
Social Learning Theory
- Bandura showed children learn to imitate what's observed, particularly behaviour which is rewarded (vicarious reinforcement).
- If a role model shows fear of something (a phobia), then that behaviour might be imitated, especially if they observed it being rewarded.
. E.g. a child who's parent has a phobia of spiders, observes their behaviour and also develop that fear of spiders, so they can receive a reward for their fear.
Classical Conditioning
- Phobias are an example of abnormal behaviour learned by association.
- A fear response to a neutral stimulus arises when the neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus, which leads to an unconditioned response.
- A traumatic experience early in life, leads to the conditioning of fear to that particular object or situation. This fear then generalises to similar objects or situations.
. E.g. someone might develop a phobia of dogs after being chased or bitten by one as a child. As an adult, this leads to a general phobia of all dogs.
- A stimulus - anxiety
. Little Albert was conditioned to develop a fear (phobia) of a white rat which he generalised to anything white and fluffy.
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Flooding
- Flooding works by exposing the patient directly to the phobic object. For example, an individual with a fear of flying will be sent up in a light aircraft.
- Breaking the link between CS and CR and goes.
- Starts with the person in extreme anxiety, but when exhaustion sets in and anxiety comes down.
- Normally all people would do anything they can do to avoid that situation.
- In flooding, the individual has no choice but to confront their fears and when the panic subsides and they find they have come to no harm.
- Learn response goes when CS is encountered without the unconditioned stimulus. This results in the CS no longer producing the CR.
Strengths
- Faster than other therapies.
- Wolpe (1973) - girls afraid of cars, drove her around for hours until she calmed down.
Weaknesses
- The therapy runs a high risk of increasing strength of the conditioned response, to the feared object/ situation rather than extinguishing it.
- It is questionable whether flooding is ethical way to treat phobias. Psychological harm.