treatments for phobias

Flooding:

it works on the premise that fear is a time-limited response. It involves Vivo (acutal) exposure to the fear stimulus, they are fully exposed to the very top of their fear hiearchy from the start. Initially the therapist will assist the person with relaxation techniques but does not intervience other then this, it works by the person being in a state of extreme anxiety but evenutally exhaustion sets in an the anxiety levels being to go down. They have to confront their fears as there is no way to escape, as the anxiety subsides they realise they have come to no harm so the fear of the phobia is extinguished. this leads to a new association being formed between the feared object and being calm. 

evaluation: 

Wolpe treated a girl with a fear of cars, by driving her around for hours. she stopped being hysterial and calmed down when she realsied she was safe. this shows that full esxposure is an affective method for treating simple phobias to a specific situation. 

Ougrin suggests that flooding gets similar response to other therapies such as systematic desensitisation but it is significantly quicker. So this means that as full expsure is more cost affective to provide and the paitent suffers from their phobia for less time. 

Cognative psychology suggests that some phobias such as social phobia is due to irratioal thinking and not due to an unpleasant experience. this means flooding therapy will be less effective in reducing the fear response. 

Barret found flooding for snake phobia on a college student was ineffective as she kept her eyes…