Question

1.Many people suffer from anxiety disorders. How can anxiety disorders impact one’s life? What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? What are the symptoms? How does it interfere with an individual's functioning? Not all treatments are equal, so what are the effective treatment interventions

2.How do behavior therapists apply principles of operant conditioning in behavior modification

Answer 1

1. Anxiety disorder disrupts the everyday normal functioning of an individual. Most of the people with anxiety disorder worry and become self-conscious about the situation. It may disrupt the health of the person. Generally, when a person has an anxiety disorder they will be sweating and have rapid heartbeats.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a disorder experienced by some people after experiencing a life-threatening or dangerous event. Some of the symptoms of PTSD are discussed as follow. The person will try to avoid all the very little things that will remind him/her about the event. Secondly, there will be times when the person will relieve the moment and experience the same trauma. Also, they are most of the time anxious and see most of the things as triggers that can have similar effects on the individual.

PTSD interfere with the normal functioning of the person to a great extent. Generally, they are anxious and get themselves associated with the event with most of the things they do. Though it is very unlikely that the same event will happen again, the person is not ready to even hear anything that might run away whenever something related comes up.

Treatment interventions are different for different people due to individual differences. However, some of the most effective treatment techniques used by the Psychologist are discussed as follows. Cognitive behavior therapy is one where the Psychologists tries to give cognitive reorientation to the person on the event. Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy is also one of the techniques where the Psychologist tried to rationally analyze the behavior of the individual. One of the most common used is the systematic desensitization with relaxation. Here the Psychologist tries to slowly desensitize the person by taking one threshold at a time which is incorporated with relaxation.

2. Behavioral psychologist uses operant conditioning as a means of behavioral modification. There are different types of methods that they used, like the token economy, shaping, time-out. However, these methods are mostly based on two principles which are explained as follows.

a. Positive reinforcement: This is one where the person will reward a person when the desired behavior is achieved.

b. Negative reinforcement: This is one where the psychologist will take away something from the participant if an undesired behavior is practiced