Phobias And Classical Conditioning

Phobias are immense and unreasonable fears of certain situations or objects. Phobias endure for long periods of time. Phobias cause intense physical and psychological reactions, and can affect things that people do in their everyday lives. A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, since anxiety is the main symptom experienced by the sufferer. Phobias can form from many different things. According to the Mayo Clinic(2017) Phobias come from negative experiences, genetic and environmental and factors as well as brain function. Numerous phobias are triggered by having a negative experience or panic attack identified with a particular question or circumstance. For genetic and environmental factors, one can learn what to be afraid of by simply seeing

Watson. Behavioral psychology is the observed behavioral styles of the patient that can be used to provide the patient the proper therapy to correct the negative or destructive behavior they are showing. It is also the branch of psychology that focuses on the study of actions, emotions and thoughts that people make.Behavioral psychologist traditionally explain the causes of behavior in terms of learning experiences or conditioning. According to them if we want to understand what shapes our personalities we must understand the basic principles of conditioning. Conditioning has been divided into two categories, classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is a behavioral intervention technique by which two stimuli are paired together. For example, seeing a spider and one cringes or want to eat whenever you smell pie. So according to “What is Behavioral Psychology” (2017), ‘By presenting a person with both a neutral stimulus and a behavior-inducing stimulus, that person will begin to respond to the neutral stimulus in the same way he or she responds to the behavior-inducing stimulus.’In classical conditioning there are things called UCS, UCR, CS and CR. Unconditioned Stimulus is a stimulus that automatically brings out a specific unconditioned response. Then there is Unconditional response, which is an unlearned, automatic response to a particular unconditioned stimulus. Next we have

One possible treatment is systematic desensitized. First used by Joseph Wolpe (1958), systematic desensitized is a therapy that aims to substitute if irresponsible phobia to relaxation response to the conditional stimulus gradually using counter conditioning. There are three steps to this treatment. First, the patient is taught relaxation techniques and breathing exercises. The patient is taught meditation how to control your breathing and muscle detensioning. Which allows them to release tension because in the case of phobias fear involves tension. For the second step the patient create a fear hierarchy. In this hierarchy the patient list stimuli that create anxiety. The patient will start with the least feared phobia and build his or her way up the hierarchy ending at the most feared phobia. For the final step the patient will work their way of the fear hierarchy. They will start with the least feared stimuli and they will practice the relaxation techniques as they go. In this stage of the therapy the patient will be confronted or asked to imagine their phobia. While doing so they will be using the relaxation techniques to ease the tension in fear that they have with the certain object or thing. When they learn to conquer that phobia and to be relaxed around object they will move of the hierarchy phobias. One by one using the relaxation techniques they will conquer each phobia