Behaviourism teaches us that behaviour is something we learn from the environment we are brought up in or the things we are taught. These 2 theories prove that idea to us whether it be a dog or a child even though many of the experiments were on animals and it’s hard to generalise. A lot of research went into the experiments and lot of good evidence came from them. The behaviourist theories are all good ways of reinforcing good behaviour and they can be very affective when treating someone with phobias or bad dreams. But they also seem to treat human behaviour like a machine and ignore the facts humans have free will.
Behavioural Therapies There are many ways of treating different types of addictions or phobias, that’s were behavioural therapies comes in. it is split up into classical and operant therapies. These therapies include implosion, flooding, aversion and systematic desensitisation. Flooding If somebody decides never to face there fear it may grown to extreme strengths over time and there for will be harder to overcome if possible at all. The client with the fear e.g. is asked to explain their most feared state. E.g. in a room full of spiders.
Flooding is like throwing someone into the deep end of a pool when they can’t swim. With the client who has a fear of spiders the therapy used in flooding to get rid of this fear would be to put them in a room full of spiders and leave them there until the fear is gone. This is done because its proven as a human we can only keep a state of fear up for so long before we calm our selves down. obviously the time someone is in fear for varies between person to person. But by the end the client would have calmed themselves down enough to realise spiders aren’t as scary as they first thought.
Aversion Aversion therapy comes from classical conditioning it’s mainly used for addiction or wrong behaviour. It is a type of therapy in which by the end of it the client will associate smoking with something horrible and not want to do it anymore. They do this buy simply putting something negative with the behaviour. With smoking its very well known that if the cigarette is dipped in horrible tasting and smelling solution when you pick it up to smoke it makes you feel sick. Done often enough, when you leave the clinic or therapy the next time you pick a cigarette up it will make you think of the horrible solution and how it tasted which then results in you not wanting to smoke. This therapy is very similar to the experiment on little Albert.
Strengths and weaknesses Flooding and aversion are 2 very good therapies and very affective. Flooding usually has a very good success rate but on some occasions it could make the phobia worse or even put the patient in danger e.g. losing the fear of spiders and picking up a deadly spider without knowing. But it’s known to be a very fast way to deal with phobias. Aversion is the best therapy used for addictions or crimes such a paedophilia and again has a very fast success rate. Both of these therapies need structure and constant but many people are learning how to do self therapy at home which is resulting in them being worse off than before.