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Understanding Human Behaviour

Perspectives on phobias and their treatment

  • 3 things to know
  • A2 6

Overview

Three types of phobia, how systematic desensitisation is carried out and reciprocal inhibition.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

How would the cognitive perspective treat a phobia?

Key term

Name three types of phobia.

Key term

Describe the typical symptoms a person experiences when confronted with a phobic stimulus.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Define a phobia.

    Model answer

    A phobia is an intense and persistent fear of an object or situation that is out of proportion to any real danger and that leads the person to avoid it.

  2. 2

    Name three types of phobia.

    Model answer

    Three types of phobia are specific phobia of a particular object or situation, social phobia of being judged by others, and agoraphobia, a fear of situations from which escape would be difficult.

  3. 3

    Describe the typical symptoms a person experiences when confronted with a phobic stimulus.

    Model answer

    Confronting a phobic stimulus produces racing heart, sweating, trembling, breathlessness and nausea, together with an overwhelming urge to escape.

  4. 4

    How does the psychoanalytic perspective explain a phobia?

    Model answer

    The psychoanalytic perspective explains a phobia as anxiety from an unconscious conflict displaced onto a harmless external object, so that the real source of the fear stays hidden.

  5. 5

    Which of Freud's case studies is used to illustrate the psychoanalytic account of phobia?

    Model answer

    Freud's case of Little Hans, a boy with a fear of horses, is used to illustrate the claim that a phobia displaces an unconscious conflict onto an external object.

  6. 6

    Evaluate psychoanalysis as a treatment for phobias.

    Model answer

    Supporters argue that psychoanalysis addresses the conflict behind the fear rather than the fear alone, while critics note that it is slow and expensive and that behaviour therapies remove phobic symptoms far more reliably.

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