Specific Phobias
Cognitive Test Biases and Free Essays
Specific phobias are the end products of a complex interplay between genetically linked traits (behavioural inhibition, disgust sensitivity, fear of suffocation) and direct or indirect learning experiences. How are phobic fears maintained, once they are acquired? Mowrer’s two-stage model mentioned earlier suggests that avoidance behaviour is responsible for the conservation of phobic fear. That is, avoidance would minimise direct and prolonged contact with the phobic object and, hence, phobics would not have the opportunity to learn that the CS is a neutral object. However, apart from avoidance behaviour, there seem to be other mechanisms playing a role in the conservation of fear.
These mechanisms are cognitive in nature and have been the object of extensive research in the past two decades. There is agreement among most researchers in this field that pathological anxiety (e.g., specific phobia) is not accompanied by a general cognitive dysfunction. In other words, it is not the case that pathological anxiety is associated with overall deficits in memory, attention, motor function, and so on.
Instead, cognitive dysfunctions in specific phobias take on a highly restricted form. Briefly, phobic subjects show evidence of dysfunctions in attentional and judgmental processes rather than memory. As well, the attentional and judgmental biases that characterise phobias are content dependent. That is to say, these biases become apparent if and only if phobics are confronted with fear-relevant stimuli (e.g., the word ‘‘spider’’ in case of a spider phobic subject).