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1/21/2013

Phobias and Addictions

PSY/300 - Assignment One Week Two

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University of Phoenix

Sherree May

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University of Phoenix 2 Phobias and Addictions

In the early 1920s, John Watson and his partner, Rosalie Rayner, worked on an experiment that I would deem unethical. This experiment involved a young infant and a rat. They created the environment that would breed a phobia in this child. This is what is called classical conditioning. Over a period of time, they would show the rat and then make a loud noise behind the childs head. This caused him to be afraid every time that he saw the rat. Even when they quit making the noise, the rat still caused fear. After a while, when the child saw that the rat appeared and no loud noise happened, the fear started to get down to a lower level. This dying out of a learned response is called extinction. When the stimulus that caused the phobia is removed for a length of time, the phobia will ease up but the reading that I have done does not show that it completely disappears (McLeod, 2012). There is an article that I came across which talks about a research program to develop an operant treatment for cocaine addiction in low-income, treatment-resistant methadone patients. The treatment's central feature is an abstinence reinforcement contingency in which patients earn monetary reinforcement for providing cocaine-free urine samples. Success and failure of this contingency appear to be an orderly function of familiar parameters of operant conditioning. Increasing reinforcement degree and extent can increase effectiveness, and sustaining the contingency can prevent relapse. Initial development of a potentially practical application of this technology suggests that it may be possible to integrate abstinence reinforcement into employment settings using salary for work to reinforce drug abstinence. Controlled studies in nonhumans and in humans, in the laboratory and in the clinic, have provided compelling evidence that drug addiction can be viewed as operant behavior and effectively treated through the direct application of operant conditioning. The relevance of operant principles to the understanding of drug addiction was suggested in early laboratory studies that showed that drugs could serve as robust reinforcers in nonhuman subjects (Silverman, 2004) . When dealing with learning or modifying behavior, we are actually working with classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning occurs when an animal or human learns to associate things For example, this is where the young child will learn that certain behaviors come with special rewards or, sometimes punishment. A child can learn that if he or she puts their toys away, a treat will follow closely behind. Another example is when you say Do you want to go bye-bye, and your child gets excited because he or she has already associated that phrase with happiness for going on a ride in the car. Operant conditioning which is the next type of conditioning, it is a group of principles that describe how humans or animals learn to survive through consequences

University of Phoenix 3 Phobias and Addictions

or reinforcement. Operant conditioning is achieved when a childs actions are affected by the consequences that pursue them. For instance, if you tell your child to sit down and give him a cookie for doing so, he will be more likely in the future to respond to the phase sit down. Alternatively, if you tell him to sit down and then smack his hand when he does so, he will be much less likely to willingly sit down in the future. These responses were formed through operant conditioning. This phrase was first coined in 1938 by B.F. Fred Skinner in 1938 in his book The Behavior of Organisms (Jackson, 2011) It is widely recognized by modern conditioning researchers that although fear conditioning can generalize very well across contexts unlike fear conditioning, extinction is highly context-specific. It is in fact a new learning process, in which the fear reduction results from inhibition rather than erasure of the original fear memory. In other words extinction depends on new learning that is specific to the context in which it is learned. That this is true not only for laboratory animals but also for human fear extinction in both laboratory and clinical settings has also been widely established (Brakel, 2011). The implications of this are important in theory and also in more practical terms in order to devise better treatments for several human psychopathologies, including post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, and a variety of anxiety disorder including panic attack. Naturally it had been logical to assume that by presenting the same circumstances without the fear stimulant that extinction would be achieved and the fear reaction would be unlearned. For it was the case that after Pavlovs dogs were exposed to many bell tones without the meat quickly following, the bell no longer evoked the salivating response. Similarly for aversive classical conditioning, research shows that conditioned fear responses to a tone paired with shocks rapidly extinguish when the tone is presented in the absence of the shock. And indeed, fear responses will diminish significantly after exposure to the stimulus alone. However as was also clear as early as 1927 when Pavlov reported spontaneous recovery of extinguished responses, despite the fact that it has often been convenient to assume that extinction involves the destruction of the original association, this bond is not destroyed even after extensive extinction training. Add to this that fear and other aversive responses are extinguished with more difficulty than other responses, while they reappear more easily, and we can begin to appreciate some of the problems met with in the exposure therapies for human dread psychopathologies (Brakel, 2011). .

University of Phoenix 4 Phobias and Addictions

The main problem with extinction is that the renewal effect is very robust. It has been demonstrated in being a strong desire as well as a loathing for conditioning in both classical and operant forms. Further, renewal has been shown not only with laboratory animal subjects, but also with people both in the laboratory and the clinical research point out, there have been many attempts to deal with renewal, each involving some way to deal with the fact that the association established during conditioning is not context-specific and generalizes in all test contexts. In contrast, the inhibitory association established during extinction is context-specific. One way to work around this problem is where classical conditioning would suggests counter-conditioning to help in cases when individuals have been conditioned to produce undesired responses. Counter-conditioning replaces the original conditioning with conditioning that is more beneficial . An individual may be conditioned to feel fear when they have to go to take part in gym activities because they were humiliated by a former teacher for their body-weight. In counter-conditioning, the teacher may try to find something totally unrelated that the student can participate in while in the gym and gradually getting the student more comfortable with being in the gym. The process of counter-conditioning will attempt to sequentially build on what the student feels comfortable with to the point that their original fear is replaced by positive feelings. Counter-conditioning requires the identification of a suitable stimulus that will always produce a positive response that is stronger than the negative response (Mahto, 2003).

University of Phoenix 5 Phobias and Addictions

Brakel, L. A. (2011). Extinction Phenomena: A Biologic Perspective on How and Why Psychoanalysis Works. Retrieved from NCBI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3169790/ Jackson, M. (2011). Operant Conditioning vs. Classical Conditioning. Retrieved from Dog Manners: http://www.dogmanners.com/obedience-and-common-problems/operant-conditioning-vs-classicalconditioning/ Mahto, A. (2003). Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning. Retrieved from mrdwab: http://mrdwab.com/works/2006-03-25-classical-conditioning.html McLeod, S. (2012). Classical Conditioning. Retrieved from Simply Psychology: http://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html Silverman, K. (2004). Exploring the Limits and Utility of Operant Conditioning in the Treatment of Drug Addiction . Retrieved from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755398/pdf/behavan00004-0079.pdf