An Investigation into the Association Between Previous Unpleasant Experiences and Phobias

An Investigation Into The Association Between Previous Unpleasant Experiences And Phobias

Abstract

For this investigation I tried to find out whether bad experiences are caused by phobias. I interviewed 20 people from the ages of 15-18 years old, asking them things like "Do you have a phobia similar to a close friend or family member?" I found that 28% of people asked have had a bad experience with their phobia. In general, I found that with all phobias, the percentage of people who had actually had a bad experience with their phobia was quite small.

Introduction

A phobia is a persistent, intense, irrational fear. They're not always sensible, don't go away easily and evoke very strong emotions. The conditioning explanation about phobias suggests that we "learn" our phobias.

Step 1 - Classical conditioning is when you associate a stimulus with a response, such as thinking that spiders are scary and that when you come into contact with one you will get scared. The phobia usually starts with a bad experience.

Step 2 - Operant conditioning (avoidance learning) is to do with positive or negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is avoiding your fear - you feel much better for not facing your fear and consequently you enjoy the feeling of relief of not having come into contact with your phobia. Positive reinforcement is facing your phobia - the more you come into come into contact with your fear, the more you get used to it so you don't become as scared.

According to the principles of Social Learning Theory, phobias are learned from observation of other people. For example - a child watches her older brother's behaviour when he finds a spider in the bath. He runs away from the bathroom screaming. His mother calms him down and reassures him. The little girl sees a spider and imitates her brother's behaviour. He acts as a model because he is similar, more powerful and was reinforced by his mother's actions. When she copies her brother's behaviour, she is consoled by her mother. This reinforces the behaviour.

Sigmund Freud thought that our behaviour is caused by unconscious forces. One defence mechanism was called repression. This is when we force distressing memories into our unconscious, where they remain unresolved. For example an explanation of agoraphobia may be that you were left alone a lot as a small child. The distress this caused has been repressed, but regardless the anxiety enters consciousness when you enter a situation where you feel exposed, vulnerable and alone.

Another defence mechanism is displacement. This is when we push our negative feelings away from the cause of the feelings and on to something which will not harm us. For example someone may never have got on with their father and be scared of him. They may not be able to tell their father how they feel, and so displaced these feelings onto foreigners. The person feels able to express their feelings towards foreigners in a way they cannot towards their father. They are able to avoid foreigners but they cannot avoid their father.

This research is being done to investigate into the link between previous unpleasant experiences and phobias.

My hypothesis is that the majority of people will have a phobia because of a bad experience; either one of their own bad experiences, or someone close to them.

Method

To collect my results I did structured interviews. This was because I wanted the participants to put more thought and detail into their answers, which they may not have done had they written them themselves.

Before I started interviewing, I thought carefully about what questions to ask and then wrote them down in a questionnaire; we then made copies of it. After that, I went around school interviewing various people and recorded the results. Then I analysed all of the questionnaires and put them all in a table; working out percentages as well. Finally we looked at our findings and compared them to other groups.

I interviewed 20 people. I interviewed eight boys over the age of 16 and twelve girls aged from 15-18 years old. I guess it could have been made a bit more evenly mixed because gender and age are always important factors but there was a restricted amount of time so I couldn't really be fussy about who I interviewed.

A problem that became apparent was that a lot of people did not want to be interviewed, saying they were too busy or didn't feel comfortable being interviewed. I tried to overcome this by very politely asking whether they'd mind being interviewed about their phobias. This way, they knew what they were getting into.

Ethical Guidelines

Informed consent - With students that were under 16, I had to explain to their teacher what I was going to be doing because the teacher was responsible of the students. I tended to go into a class and ask the teacher if any of the students were free to be interviewed on phobias. Then I'd take maybe a couple of students out of the lesson.

Protection from harm - To make sure that