 All right, so let's talk about one of my favorite topics in all of behavior analysis. Let's talk about phobias. Phobias are irrational fears that people have for specific stimuli or settings. So you've probably heard of like claustrophobia where you're afraid of small spaces. You've had different examples of phobia that people will report. Some of them are really amazing and eclectic, but essentially what we're looking at here is like a really powerful all-encompassing fear so much so that a person will do anything to escape or avoid a stimulus. So you can see that phobia is actually just a really more kind of complicated more advanced example of negatively reinforced behavior. Let me give you an idea of how some of these phobias can develop their experience. Imagine that remember a person with these fears will escape or avoid any stimulus that causes fear. So if you have a baby who is very very afraid of dogs, if you've ever experienced like a dog, but you know that it's it's really easy for this to develop. So maybe initially this child was exposed to a dog. The dog was unfriendly. Maybe I've seen this happen an unfortunate number of times. But the child approaches the dog while the dog is eating and the dog turns and snaps and bites the child. Right? You can attribute blame wherever you like. You can say it's poor parenting. It's poor supervision. It's what matters is the dog, the baby approached the dog, the dog bit the baby. Now the baby through a combination of classical conditioning and operating conditioning is going to have a significant amount of fear. I say classical and operant because remember classical is that reflects a fear response and operant is the stuff that we choose to do. So if a baby is surrounded by a stimulus like a dog, they're probably going to engage in some responses. They're going to be afraid. They're going to cry. And what you might expect is that a caregiver is going to come and provide that care. So you can develop a pattern of when presented with that stimulus exhibiting a fear response such that other people will come and help you. Now when we talk about phobias, in addition to it being kind of an irrational fear, it's not just of this one specific dog. Like if it's just of this dog, let's call him Frank. Give it to Frank here that's bit the child. The child being afraid of Frank because Frank big, that's very rational. The place where it becomes irrational is Oh, pardon me. The place where it becomes irrational It's going to actually prevent you from leading a kind of normal everyday life. We might see for instance that the dog doesn't or the child doesn't just fear Frank the dog. The child could develop a generalization of fear to all of the dogs. So not just Frank on the left, but any sweet natured German shepherd. Let's call this from Zara. Or we could see that any dog whatsoever can elicit a kind of intense fear response from from the child. All right, so this is a classically conditioned association. We're talking about eliciting fear, which is a reflexive response, but then it gets combined with operant conditioning. So you see the fear behavior, you do whatever you have to, you choose behaviors and allow you to escape or avoid that fear or nuisance stimulus. For a child that could be crying, it could be crawling away, it could be doing anything you can to just get the heck away from that. We might find that as you get older, you choose some different behaviors. So you're probably definitely not going to go to places where there actually are dogs. You might find yourself avoiding situations where you'll find them like the dog park or animal shelters or walking trails, for instance, because we know that people will often take their dogs there. So remember, we have escape, which is where you just do whatever you can to get the heck away from the stimulus because it's already present. And you have avoidance, which is where you try to get away from environments that might have that stimulus so that you can prevent the stimulus from ever being delivered. So that's typically some of the hallmarks that we see with phobias is that people will work so, so hard, they'll be completely irrational in their desire to escape the stimulus. And they'll do anything in their power to avoid circumstances where the stimulus might occur that they're afraid of, that we see some really amazing responses for phobia. There will be people, for instance, with agoraphobia who can't go outside, that will develop really complex repertoires to prevent them from ever going outside. And generally speaking, if we're talking about the behavioral treatment of phobia, we're going to be looking at one of three different examples. So I'm going to tell you about the three different examples. We're going to talk really briefly about the human hierarchy and how they kind of fit in there. But I'm going to give you an example of what not to do. Remember phobia is a combination of classical conditioning and operant conditioning. So classical conditioning is conditioning on reflexes. It's an involuntary response. So to address that, and perhaps the least intrusive way to address that, is to do something called classical counter conditioning. If there's a stimulus that elicits an aversive reaction from the client, then you're trying to pair that stimulus with something that produces or elicits the opposite reaction. I once had a sweet old man dog Murphy. He was the best dog. But when he came to me from the shelter, he was very dog-dog aggressive. So he would see another dog, his hackles would raise, he would start fighting and start lunging at the leash, and he'd be very aggressive toward the other dog. So I need to define, with classical counter conditioning, a way of reducing that aggressive response. Well, there's a few things that you cannot do while you're trying to attack another dog and chief among them is eating. So for my sweet old man Murphy, what I did was cut up some really stinky gross hot dogs that he just loved. And if I noticed in the distance that a dog was coming, I would just start feeding him that food, just full of food, full of food, full of food, treat, treat, treat, treat, treat, treat, treat, treat, treat. And they were high quality, really powerful reinforcers, the hot dogs, he would do anything for them. And they would elicit from him an opposite reaction to aggression. So he couldn't both be having an aggressive reaction and this repetitive reaction from the food. So that's an example of classical counter conditioning. With phobia, if a child is incredibly afraid of a stimulus, give them a stimulus that elicits the opposite reaction, right? So surround them with stimuli that evoke comfort, make Nana there, have them sit on Nana's lap, like Nana is comfort, Nana is warmth and Nana is whatever, and then present the dog, right? So that can be an example of classical counter conditioning. And it's the least aversive of these phobia treatments. Now systematic desensitization is where you slowly change the stimulus features of the feared stimulus. You go from like a hierarchy of least feared to most feared objects. So if you have like a fear of spiders, I'm sorry, if you have a fear of spiders, like a legit phobia, you are going to punch a baby to get away from a spider. Maybe I know that you're not actually afraid of like spider stickers, stickers of a spider, right? So I can present you with spider stickers. And when I present you with a spider sticker, no fear is elicited, which is great. Then I'll present you with like a more advanced kind of puffy sticker. So it's not like a flat two dimensional, but it's like a three dimensional puffy sticker. And then that elicits no fear reaction, which is great. And then maybe I replaced that with like a slightly more real looking small toy of a spider, right? And so on and so forth. And tell what I'm doing is making the stimulus more and more and more like the real thing that elicits the fear response without allowing the learner to escape or avoid it, because there's nothing to escape or avoid. They didn't have any fear reaction to it. So what I'm doing there is systematically reducing their fear by presenting them with safe, slightly less safe, slightly less safe, much less safe, real stimuli, but I'm doing it really slowly so it doesn't elicit that powerful fear reaction. The last one, the flooding response. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me go back a second. So systematic desensitization is a more advanced procedure, requires a lot of really careful skill. And it's probably most analogous to like a differential reinforcement or shaping procedure. This one is really challenging. And I don't recommend that people who are unskilled do this because you have to understand the client really, really well. And if you go wrong here, if you make a mistake in treating phobia, you make the phobia stronger. Now, speaking of ways you should never treat phobia, flooding, flooding is quite possibly the worst way to treat a phobia. Flooding is the fear equivalent of your uncle throwing you in a lake to teach you how to swim, which is to say that you essentially present the person with the stimulus in a way that they cannot escape or avoid it. So let me show you an example. Okay, so one of the best examples of flooding is in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. So in what I'm showing you on screen now is just a still image from the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. So you got your Indiana Jones. You've got, oh gosh, I always forget her name. Give me just a moment. Marion Ravenwood, that's her name. So you've got Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood. And they are essentially searching for the Ark of the Covenant. It takes them to Pyramid in Egypt. They are searching around Indiana Jones's climbing down a rope and falls into a pit and that's just full of snakes. Now Indiana Jones has a terrible phobia of snakes. So he falls in there and you can see he's just immediately overcome with terror. He's doing what he can to kind of escape or avoid there. Flooding is, like I mentioned, it's like your uncle throwing you in the lake. It's like Indiana Jones falling into this pit of snakes. It's a terrible thing to do, but essentially what you're doing if you're flooding is you're presenting so much of the stimulus and you are preventing every opportunity from the learner to escape that stimulus that eventually, knock on wood, eventually the fear response will not occur. But this is such a chancy. This is such a dicey way of doing this. In fact, I would go so far as to say this is both stupid and unethical because it's really difficult to control whether a person actually can get away. Remember, a phobia is so dramatic and I gave you a video of some people being exposed to puppies who have legitimate fear of dogs. The fear can be so dramatic that they will do anything. They will punch a puppy, they will kick a baby, they will do anything to get away. So if you do not have perfect control over that environment, you definitely shouldn't do flooding. Moreover, there are better ways of doing this that are not flooding and flooding is probably the most aversive procedure you could use. It's analogous to sort of using positive punishment because you are like delivering that aversive stimulus and you are preventing any opportunity from getting away. So the most aversive procedure to use is flooding. Don't do it. Just don't. These are some of the different ways that people can treat phobias. If you haven't already checked out this, people with fear of dogs meeting pit bull puppies, definitely check it out. It's pretty cute. I don't think that any of those folks had true phobia because remember, if they had true phobia, they would have done some bad things to those puppies. And it's probably a weird combination of symptomatic desensitization and flooding because they're tiny puppies. It's not a full grown pit bull, which most people are afraid of. This is a weird example. I don't know that I would recommend either of them, but do check it out because I think it creates a kind of interesting real world example of these phenomenon. This has been talking about phobias, an advanced version of negative reinforcement. Let me know if you guys have any questions. We'll come back and finish up with one more video for this topic.