A weakness of the behavioural approach to explaining phobias is that it is an incomplete explanation. Explain.

A weakness of the behavioural approach to explaining phobias is that it is an incomplete explanation. Explain.



Even if we accept classical and operant conditioning are involved in phobias, there's still some aspects that require further explanation. Bounton (2007) points out that evolutionary factors have some significance, but two-process model doesn't mention this. E.g. we easily get phobias of things that were dangerous in our evolutionary past like the dark and snakes. It's adaptive to have these fears. Seligman (1971) called this biological preparedness - innate predisposition to acquire such fears. But, it's much more unlikely to have a fear of cars or guns, even though these are more dangerous to us now. This is presumed to be because they haven't existed for long so we're not biologically prepared to learn fear responses to them. This is a problem for the two-process theory as it shows there's more to learning phobias than simple conditioning.

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