Critically evaluate psychological and/or biological explanations of any anxiety disorder Essay

A psychological explanation of phobias is the behaviourist approach. They suggest that behaviour is learnt in three ways. The first is through classical conditioning. This is when behaviour is learnt through association. For example, if someone gets drunk from drinking vodka and this leads them to being sick, they learn to associate being sick with vodka and therefore avoid drinking vodka to stop the negative behaviour occurring.
Pavlov’s dogs learnt to associate the bell with food therefore when they heard the bell they began to salivate as they knew that food was coming as they had learnt to associate them two things.
Operant conditioning is behaviour learnt through reinforcement and punishment. If behaviour is reinforced then it is likely to continue and if behaviour is punished then is likely that the behaviour won’t happen again. There is negative and positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is when a task is carried out to avoid something nasty happening. Positive reinforcement is when someone receives a reward for doing something.
The Social Learning Theory is the final behaviourist approach which suggests that all behaviour is learnt through watching others. Bandura’s bobo doll study supports this idea as the children who watched the videos copied the behaviour that they saw in the video, for example the children who saw the video of the bobo doll been smacked, then when they was put in a room with the doll, they did the same and smacked the doll.
To evaluate these theories, it could be said that these alone aren’t enough to explain why people get phobias as there are other impacts such as genetics and psychodynamic approaches meaning that it is reductionist. The behaviourist approach has lead to successful treatments such as CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) developing which have been successful when it comes to treating mental disorders such as phobias. The theories are deterministic as it suggests that we just copy behaviour whereas we...