hey everyone welcome back to verity mind we're back with another video exploring the topic of psychopathology so far in this series we've explored definitions of abnormality and we've looked at the characteristics of phobias depression and ocd now we're going to move on to look at the explanations for these conditions it's important to be aware that for the psychology course the emphasis is just on one explanation for each condition so for phobias it will be a behaviorist explanation for depression a cognitive explanation and for ocd a biological explanation that's not to say that there aren't other ways to explain these conditions there are it's just that for the a-level course the focus is on one type of explanation for each condition having said all that let's explore the behaviorist explanation of phobias the main focus for the behaviourist approach is on how behaviour is learned from the environment in particular the role of stimulus and response learning you may remember the work of john b watson with his research scaring a little baby ivan pavlov with his work measuring the saliva of dogs and b.f skinner with his work exploring the effective rewards and electric shocks on rats behaviourists propose two main ways that behaviors learned firstly classical conditioning this is learning through association this is where two stimuli are repeatedly paired together until they become associated with one another he's been trained to expect pain when it hears the noise and secondly behaviorists talk about operant conditioning this is learning through consequences and reinforcement and involves positive reinforcement where following a behavior a reward is given that strengthens the behavior and makes it more likely that the behavior will be repeated and then negative reinforcement where a person avoids a situation that is unpleasant this also strengthens the behavior and makes it more likely that it will be repeated now you might be thinking great thanks for that recap on behaviorism but what does all that got to do with phobias well i'm glad you asked hobart mower in 1960 proposed what is known as the two process model this firstly states that phobias are one acquired by classical conditioning let's imagine someone has a phobia of balloons the behaviourist explanation states that there is a neutral stimulus in this case balloons it is neutral because in and of itself balloons are neutral they don't produce a phobic response they're just balloons then there is an unconditioned stimulus the word unconditioned is getting at the idea that it has not been learned for example hearing a very loud noise can lead to a response of fear anxiety or panic we don't have to learn this we just know now what happens is the neutral stimulus a balloon and the unconditioned stimulus allowed noise are paired together our behaviorists would say associated together when this happens it leads to the same response as before fear anxiety and panic finally after lots of repeated pairings the unconditioned stimulus a loud noise is removed and you are left with the balloon which because of the previous pairing is no longer a neutral stimulus but a conditioned stimulus and you've guessed it when you now have the balloon it leads to a response of fear anxiety and panic so if classical conditioning explains how phobias are learned how does behaviourism explain how people continue to have their phobias the second part of the model says that phobias are maintained through operant conditioning and the emphasis here is our negative reinforcement remember that this is about avoiding a situation that is unpleasant and if you've seen the previous video on the characteristics of phobias then you might have recognized avoidance as one of the defining behavioral characteristics whenever we avoid a phobic stimulus we successfully escape the fear and anxiety that we would have suffered if we had remained there this is a pleasant experience when we avoid our fear by avoiding this negative experience we strengthen our fear of the phobia and so each time we avoid it we maintain our fear for example if we first acquired a fear of balloons we may then maintain this fear by avoiding birthday parties where balloons are highly likely or even refuse to enter a room where someone has brought balloons in for a friend's 18th birthday now let's discuss this explanation of phobias firstly there is supporting evidence for the two process model which comes from the famous study by watson and rayner in 1920 and their study of little albert at nine months old little albert was presented with a range of objects to see what his emotional reaction was to them this included various animals one of which was a white rat albert had normal reactions to these objects didn't display any signs of fear a few months later however when albert was 11 months old he was presented with the white rat again and reached out to play with it but this time watson and rayner struck a steel bar with a hammer to make a loud noise right behind his head no surprises that albert was frightened by the noise to the point that he cried and moved away from the white rat they repeated this pairing again and again eventually albert learned to associate the white rat with the unpleasant noise and would show fear turn away and cry when the white rat was shown to him here we can see how a neutral stimulus the white rat was paired with an unconditioned stimulus a loud noise which eventually led to the white rat becoming you guessed it a conditioned stimulus when it was presented on its own it led to a fear response now you may have been thinking as we explored the behavioral explanation of phobias that if this is how people develop phobias can we not use the same idea to treat phobias and yes we can this explanation can be praised because of its practical application in being able to treat phobias one of these treatments is known as systematic desensitization and involves applying the same principles of classical conditioning to learn to associate the thing someone is afraid of with a new response the patient is taught to relax as deeply as possible which could involve deep breathing exercises or visualization of pleasant scenes like lying on the beach in the summer they are then gradually exposed to the object or situation they are afraid of and then move through different levels of exposure on a hierarchy whilst in this relaxed state so in the case of our example to do with balloons the person would associate a balloon with something relaxing such as their summer holidays on the beach this is because a person cannot be anxious and relaxed at the same time for more information on systematic desensitization check out this other video i've made on that topic on to our third area of evaluation one of the best ways to evaluate the behavioral explanation is to compare it with another explanation remember in this topic of psychopathology the focus is just to look at phobias from a behaviorist point of view depression from a cognitive point of view an ocd from a biological point of view but obviously you can explain each of them from the other viewpoints let's do that in two ways for phobias firstly biological explanations the behaviourist explanation of phobias states that all phobias are learned which means that it doesn't take into account biological explanations that may be involved some people experience the same incident but they don't all develop a phobia why might this be seligman in 1971 argued that sometimes humans are genetically predisposed or susceptible to learn an association with something that could be highly fearful this is because in the past we've evolved to understand that snakes loud noises or the dark are potentially dangerous seligman called this biological preparedness this means that we may have an increased likelihood of developing certain phobias because of a specific variation in our dna which predisposes us to this fear as a result it could be argued from this that the behaviorist explanation of phobias cannot alone account for the development of all phobias and our second comparison can be with cognitive explanations the behaviourist explanation of phobias is also limited because it doesn't take into account the role of cognitive factors this is because there are aspects to phobias that cannot be explained simply through behaviorist principles for example one of the key characteristics of phobias are irrational thoughts which create anxiety and may trigger a phobia researchers like beck have drawn attention to the importance of irrational thoughts like over-generalizing and catastrophizing that can be involved in people's fears therefore it could be argued that the behaviourist explanation of phobias is oversimplified because it neglects such cognitive processes check out this video on beck's cognitive explanation for depression for more information on that theory so that's the behaviourist explanation of phobias check out this playlist for more videos related to psychopathology if you would like more information relating to mental health whether to help you or others do check out the links in the description for some helpful online resources and support services thanks for watching the video i hope you enjoyed it and if you found it helpful consider subscribing see you in the next one