The word ‘phobia’, deriving from Ancient Greece, meaning a strong irrational fear, dreads or more informally ‘hang up’ of specific objects or situations. The word is named after Phobos, the Greek god who frightened his enemies. There have been and continue to be many studies on phobias, their development and also treatments used to help individuals overcome them. And I’ll be focusing on this throughout this essay.
It’s safe to say that people can be trained to fear certain things and in reverse to that can be trained to eventually cease to fear a certain thing. A very famous example of an experimentally induced learned phobia is of ‘Little Albert’. According to John B Watson behaviour needs be observable in order to be measured. Following Pavlov’s findings, Watson and Rosalie Rayner set up the first experiment where fear was conditioned in a person. (Watson, J.B. and Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of experimental Psychology).
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The experiment on ‘Little Albert’. (Watson, J.B. and Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of experimental Psychology) being one well-known example which used principles of classical conditioning. Although phobias can be developed in people, they can also be extinguished. People can be trained to also fight off their fear. Modelling and also cognitive behavioural therapy has proven to be successful treatments of fears and phobias. Cognitive behavioural therapy has even been tested on agoraphobics (Ost L-G., Westling, B.E and Hellstrom, K. (1993). Applied relaxation, exposure in-vivo and cognitive methods in the treatment of panic disorder with agoraphobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy). It is clear that the topic ‘phobia’ is an intriguing one and many studies have been done on this subject and continue to be done because of its complexity, and many treatments are developed for the individual to try to not only surpass but also conquer their