The behavioural approach to explaining phobias: the two-process model, including classical and operant conditioning. The behavioural approach to treating phobias: systematic desensitisation and flooding.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain phobias using the two-process model and describe the treatments of systematic desensitisation and flooding. The exam skill is to apply both conditioning processes to acquisition and maintenance, to describe the two treatments precisely, and to evaluate them against the cognitive evidence.

The two-process model

The two-process model uses both forms of conditioning to explain the full lifecycle of a phobia. Acquisition is by classical conditioning: a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus that naturally causes fear, so the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus producing a conditioned fear response. Watson and Rayner's Little Albert study demonstrated this directly: an 11-month-old infant was made to fear a white rat by pairing it with a loud, frightening noise, and the fear then generalised to other white furry objects. Maintenance is by operant conditioning: once the phobia exists, the person avoids the feared stimulus, and because avoidance removes or prevents the unpleasant anxiety, the avoidance behaviour is negatively reinforced and so persists. The cost of this avoidance is that the person never stays in the situation long enough to learn that the stimulus is harmless, so the fear is never extinguished. This explains both why phobias form quickly and why they endure.

Treatments

Both treatments are forms of exposure therapy, but they differ in pace. Systematic desensitisation is gradual. The therapist and client first build an anxiety hierarchy ranking feared situations from least to most frightening, then the client learns deep relaxation, and finally the client moves up the hierarchy one step at a time, mastering relaxation at each level before progressing. It works by counter-conditioning and reciprocal inhibition: because it is physiologically impossible to be relaxed and afraid simultaneously, the relaxation response gradually replaces the fear response as the conditioned response to the stimulus. Flooding takes the opposite approach, exposing the client immediately and at full intensity to the most feared situation, with no gradual steps and no escape, so that the fear response, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, eventually exhausts itself through extinction, and the client learns the stimulus is harmless. Flooding is faster and cheaper but more traumatic, so it requires informed consent and is unsuitable for some clients. Evaluating the behavioural account, a strength is that the treatments are genuinely effective for many phobias, but a limitation is that the two-process model cannot explain phobias that arise with no conditioning event, which biological preparedness (Seligman's idea that we are evolutionarily prepared to fear ancestral dangers such as snakes) and the cognitive approach explain better.