Can 'learning' explain phobias about snakes or creepy-crawlies

Learning happens quite naturally and goes by quite unnoticed but in many cases we have to put effort and work hard to learn things (Pritchard, 2009). Learning is crucial for mastering new skills, for personality and emotional development and social interaction. This essay will discuss ‘learning’ and phobia looking from behaviourist and cognitive approaches and argue can learning explain phobias about snakes or ‘creepy-crawlies’.

This paragraph will consider what is ‘learning’ and how behaviourists and cognitivists explain ‘learning’. Learning may be defined as a relatively permanent change in behaviour or behaviour potential based on experience. Our capacity for learning depends upon both genetic heritage and the nature of our environment (Zimbardo, 1992). We learn by interacting with our environment. Sometimes we have no explicit teacher but we have a direct sensorimotor connection to environment. Exercising this connection produces a wealth of information about: cause and effect, the consequences or actions and what to do in order to achieve goals. When we are learning we are acutely aware of how our environment responds to what we do and we seek to influence what happens through our behaviour (Sutton & Barto, 1998).

‘Learning’ by behavioural approach assumes that a learner is essentially passive, responding to environmental stimuli. (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2010). Learning will take place if the learner displays behaviour related to the new learning. The behaviourists de-emphasize the brain or mental activity in the learning process and believe that the brain is simply like any other organ; its neural activities are conditioned to occur based upon a past history of consequences. ‘Learning’ occurs when new consequences are experienced (Blanchard & Thacker, 2004). Behaviourists claim that the environment controls learning, people respond to stimuli in their environment, and their response is positively or negatively reinforced. A person will learn from this reinforcement to either continue displaying that behaviour if it was positively reinforced, or not to display that behaviour if it resulted in a negative reinforcement or consequence (Ford, 2009).

Cognitivism claims that even though learning can be inferred from behaviour, it is separate from the behaviour itself (Blanchard & Thacker, 2004). It is defined as a relatively permanent change in cognition occurring as a result of experience. Cognition refers to the mental processing of information. Cognitivism states that people are rational beings who require active participation in order to learn, whose actions are a consequence of thinking. Here the learner’s role is active, self-directed, and self-evaluating. The approach suggests that the learner controls learning, he decides what is important to learn and learn through techniques he feels comfortable with. ...

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This paragraph will discuss what is phobia and how ‘learning’, cognitivists and behaviourists explain phobia. Phobias are characterized by fear which is persistent, irrational, is beyond voluntary control, leads to avoidance of the feared situation and is disabling (Morgan, 2003). Phobias are bound to a particular object or situation. The most common phobia in the world is for ‘creepy crawlies’. We react differently to crawlies than to other stimuli because through negative information people associate them with danger. Resent research showed that although everyone preferentially attends to crawlies in the environment as they are potentially dangerous, only inexperienced participants display a negative response. Some scientists argue that people posses fear for crawlies because they are predisposed by evolution to fear certain things, such as snakes or spiders that would have been dangerous to our ancestors (Science Daily, 2008).

Learning theory states that phobias develop when fear responses are reinforced or punished. Reinforcement can be positive or negative. Positive - the presentation of something positive (reward). Positive punishment - the presentation of something negative (pain) (Fritscher, 2008).

According to behaviourists phobias are a learned behaviour, simply intense classically conditioned fears that develop when a neutral stimulus is paired with a traumatic event (S. Mineka & R. Zinbarg, 2006). Classical conditioning reinforces specific phobias. Through conditioning, people repeatedly associate the feared object with anxiety, strengthening the fear. (L. C. DeLuca, 2009). This explanation of phobic responding arose from Watson and Rainer’s (1920) demonstration that aversive and avoidant responses towards a previously neutral stimulus could be learned (P.A. Field, 2005). In their study, a child, was trained to fear a white rat he had initially liked by pairing its appearance with aversive stimulus – a loud gong struck behind him. The unconditional startle response and emotional distress to the noxious noise was the basis of child’s learning to react with fear to the appearance of the white rat (G. P. Zimbardo, 1992). The implication from this study was that excessive and persistent fear could be acquired through experiencing a stimulus in temporal proximity to some fear-inducing or traumatic event (P.A. Field, 2005). Phobia can occur even without direct experience with the conditional and unconditional stimulus (G.N. Martin et al, 2007). For example, the child who watches an older sibling go hysterical noticing a spider is learning that this creature is to be feared and is picking up pointers on reacting on them accordingly. People can develop phobias vicariously - information can convey the message than an object or situation is more threatening and unmanageable than it actually is and thereby influence the development of a phobia (T.J. Bruce & W.C. Sanderson, 1998).

Cognitivists assume that phobia is linked to being more likely to notice negative stimuli and to believe that negative events are more likely to occur in the future. For example some people who have had a traumatic experience with a dog, did not develop a dog phobia, whereas others did develop a phobia. This is because people that developed a phobia focus more on the possible appearance of the fearful situation and become scared (T. Klausch, 2008). Cognitive model states that the individual will respond with fear to a harmless situation by a continuous link to a harmless conditioned stimulus (M. Sargent, 2010).

Behaviourists say that phobias can be learned so it can be unlearned too. They offer to treat phobias using flooding, where the person is immersed in the fear reflex until the fear fades away. Another way counter-conditioning where one is trained to substitute a relaxation response for the fear response in the presence of the phobic stimulus (F. Culbertson, 1995).

Cognitivists offer to use systematic desensitization - to very gradually introduce the feared stimulus in a step-by-step fashion. Systematic desensitization can be paired with modelling, where the patient observes others in the presence of the phobic stimuli who are responding with relaxation rather than fear (F. Culbertson, 1995).

To conclude, this essay has reviewed what is ‘learning’ and how behaviourist and cognitive approaches can explain ‘learning’ and development of phobias. To resume, phobia is a learned response to certain situations or certain subjects. They are learned rather than evolved. People can learn to fear through conditioning, conditioned responses, as well as observing and experiencing fearful situations.

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