Classical Conditioning

Introduction: Almost everyone has an irrational fear or two—of mice, for example, or your annual dental checkup. For most people, these fears are minor. But when fears become so severe that they cause tremendous anxiety and interfere with your normal life, they’re called phobias. A phobia is an intense fear of something that, in reality, poses little or no actual danger. Common phobias and fears include closed-in places, heights, highway driving, flying insects, snakes, and needles. However, we can develop phobias of virtually anything. Most phobias develop in childhood, but they can also develop in adults. If you

Watson and Rayner aimed to investigate; ‘Can we condition fear of an animal, e.g., a white rat, by visually presenting it and simultaneously striking a steel bar?’ (B.Watson, R.Rayner, 2000). To test this method the case study was carried out in a controlled lab-based setting, with participant observation. To first eliminate any participant variables, little Albert at nine months of age was subject to a successive viewing of a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, a dog, with masks and without hair, along with cotton wool, burning newspaper and other variables. (B.Watson, R Rayner , 1920). Manipulation was the most common reaction to these encounters (attempts to touch or engage with the stimulus presented), Watson and Rayner (1920) write ‘At no time did this infant ever show fear in any situation.’

The biological explanation for the acquisition of phobic disorders establishes that phobias are caused by genetics, innate influences and the principles of biochemistry. This theory recognizes that an oversensitive fear response may be inherited, causing abnormal levels of anxiety. This is illustrated in the basis of inheritance, particularly the adrenergic theory that convicts that those who have an acquisition to phobic disorders consequently show high levels of arousal in the automatic nervous system, which leads to increased amounts of adrenaline, thus causing high levels of anxiety.

and Phobias, an online article by kidshealth.org Fear is simply your body reacting to something

Dog: Once the test began with the dog approaching the child he did not react violently as he did with the rabbit. He did not start crying until the dog walked away. When the dog approached the child the second time he leaned to one side and started crying (Watson J. B., & Rayner, R.,

Though the experience of phobias is relatively common and their physical characteristics are generally well understood, there is no real consensus on the neurobiological basis of phobias. Instead, there are currently several different models and theories that work to try to understand how and why phobias occur in the human brain. Most hypotheses regarding phobias take a different approach, from biological to psychoanalytic to evolutionary. Is there one model that seems "less wrong" or more satisfying in our efforts to understand the biology of phobias? Using the various models, how do phobias seem to come about? How does thinking about phobias add to our understanding of the brain and behavior?

It is seen that the rats promptly learned to associate a taste CS with a UCS of nausea but not with the foot-shock, where the audiovisual CS was conditioned to the foot-shock but not to nausea (Walker 1995).

A phobia can be acquired by a person by making the person associate one thing with something not pleasant or painful to them. The effect of this can be permanent if the extinction process on the person

Whether someone with a phobia of dogs was bit, or someone afraid of heights felt their seatbelt come loose on a rollercoaster. These are all real, distinct, moments that people with phobias experience and remember vividly. Victims of Trypophobia however, typically cannot explain where their irrational fear comes from. Arnold Wilkins and Geoff Cole are two Psychology professors at Britain’s University at Essex who hope to be the first people to bring some research on the topic still in its infancy. Wilkins and Cole have investigated the visual elements behind the phobia and their study is currently under peer review by the journal Psychological Science. Wilkins and Cole compared 76 images of Trypophobic images with 76 controlled images of holes not associated with the phobia and found that Trypophobic objects share similar qualities in terms of contrast and special frequencies (“Trypophobia: Fear of Holes” 2013). However the real breakthrough in their research came when a sufferer reported that the blue-ringed octopus, one of the most poisonous animals in the world triggered his phobia. This led Wilkins and Cole to examine various poisonous animals and they found similar patterns in terms of contrast and special frequencies to the Trypophobic objects (“Trypophobia: Fear of Holes” 2013). Cole states “These findings suggest that there may be an ancient evolutionary part of the brain telling people that they are looking at a poisonous

Psychological Explanations of One Anxiety Disorder Phobias are an example of an anxiety disorder and the psychological explanations of these are cognitive, psychodynamic, behavioral and social factors. The Behavioral, Psychodynamic and social factors of the psychological explanation will be discussed in greater detail. Behavioral explanations say that all behaviour is learnt whether it is normal or abnormal and this approach has been applied to humans and animals.

Is it possible to rouse fear from a stimulus that at first caused no such response? Classical conditioning is a type of learning where a response is produced from combining a conditioned stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus to produce an unconditioned response. Ivan Pavlov did a famous study, pairing the sound of a bell with food to produce salivation. After a while, just the sound alone would produce salivation. “Little Albert”, an infant that belonged to a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home was experimented on by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner. Watson and Rayner claim that “Little Albert” was a healthy, unemotional, and stable child. The experiment began with the introduction of a white rat, which alone, produced no fear response. At 11 months and 3 days, the rat was paired with a loud noise. The loud noise frightened “Little Albert”. He began to associate the fear he experienced with the white rat since it was paired with the loud noise.

In general, a phobia refers to “extreme [and] irrational fear reactions” (Powell, Honey, & Symbaluk, 2013, p. 190). Phobias are developed through a process called classical conditioning. Classical conditioning involves “a process in which one stimulus that does not elicit a certain response is associated with a second stimulus that does; as a result, the first stimulus also comes to elicit a response” (Powell et al., 2013, pp. 109-110).

This specific phobia can lead to the person experience of an intense fear when not being able to break out of a populated area (Barlow & Mavissakalian, pp 4). This causes people having to evade open and heavily crowed environments with little possibilities to exit over their massive fear of going through a panic attack. Therefore, today there are signs in many rides at themed parks that warn people of the closed areas. This specific category of phobias causes the person to fear traveling on bus or even waiting in a line. This phobia can also lead to being dependent of someone because they are too afraid to go outside of their homes. Barlow & Mavissakalian (1981 pp 4-5), implicated that the clinical picture painted is consistent and consists or fears of going out to public places and open and crowded places, fears of walking alone or using any means or public transportation, and fears of being alone at home. Agoraphobia is the most disabling of all phobias and usually begins in early adolescence.

The goal of the experiment is to determine whether sniffy the rat will associate a flash of light with the tone which is presented with a conditioned stimulus of a tone. It is predicted that sniffy will eventually learn to associate to light with the tone and this will elicit a conditioned response in terms of the shock presented in stage one. There were four stages in the experiment each consisted of five trials over the course of five minutes, the first stage was shown with the first stimulus of a medium tone followed by a second stimulus of a shock on high. The second stage had a first stimulus of a medium light followed by a medium tone. The third stage included only a medium tone and the fourth stage was presented with a medium light.

However, phobia can even cause people to risk their health. For example, the fear of dentists can leave people suffering from it willing to risk the health of their teeth in order to avoid having to go through an exam or procedure ( MacKay). When one knows about an upcoming confrontation, it can be the reason why one can not sleep or finds it hard to focus on important tasks. Due the change in daily routine, this unrealistic fear can interfere with the ability to socialize, work, or go about everyday life, brought on by and object, event or situation. But even animals have anxieties and phobias just as every human being (www.phobia-help.de). A phobia is an irrational fear, one knows that the object or situation, one is scared off, can not hurt one, but one is still afraid. A reason for this is that the human mind can not distinguish what is real and imaginary. When one has uncontrollable anxiety attacks, he loses rational judgement, leading to complicated problems. However, anyone can develop a phobia, men and women, teens and young adults, and elderly lady or a one-year-old boy (MacKay).