Esther Dugoni

500 words on the Case Study : Esther Dugoni. 1. What is the specific disorder? 2. Justify your answer using specific examples from the case. 3. Explain how classical conditioning played a role in the development of her problem. Make sure to specify all components of classical conditioning in your answer. 4. What psychotherapy do you think would be most appropriate for Esther. Give a detailed description of why you would recommend that psychotherapy and cute specifically how the techniques within that therapy would help her. Provide examples to illustrate your point.500 words.

ANSWER

Esther Dugoni

Esther Dugoni experienced a traumatic situation while flying, which led her to have a specific phobia of flying. The idea of flying makes her anxious and unnecessarily nervous such that she has been avoiding flying for years. She is suffering from an anxiety disorder caused by an event that she underwent in an airplane, and thus she has a specific phobia of airplanes. Patients with specific phobia usually have an unwarranted fear of specific objects or situations. They are usually fears of certain animals or certain situations, such as flying in this case (Morrison, 2014). The anxiety which is produced by exposure to the stimuli such as flying may take the form of a panic attack. In her report to the clinician, Esther explains that she cannot fl. She does not even like meeting people in airports because the presence of planes in the airport makes her feel as if she cannot breathe. The stimuli, in this case, are planes which make her have a panic attack, and thus she has been avoiding flying.

Classical conditioning is learning that happens unconsciously. When one learns through classical conditioning, an automatic response is paired with a specific stimulus. In the case of Esther, she was conditioned to feel panicky and have become overly anxious by the situation she was in on one of her flights (Morrison 2014). The classical conditioning process involves some steps. The first step is unconditioned stimulus. This is the thing that triggers the automatic response. In this case, the unconditioned stimulus is lanes. The next process is the unconditioned response, which is the panic and nervousness that she feels when she thinks about flying. The next step is conditioned stimulus, which is the response one gets after being presented with the unconditioned stimulus repeatedly. Then there is the conditioned response which is the response that one has to the conditioned stimulus, which in this case is panic.

Esther is conditioned to get panicky when she is anywhere associated with flying because of her bad experience on one flight. The bad experience lasted for some time, which led her to be conditioned to associate flying with the bad experience, hence her response when flying is mentioned (Garcia, 2017). Classical conditioning has led to it affecting her life and her work. She is supposed to fly to her mother’s burial and other work-related errands, but she cannot because she is conditioned to associate flying with the one bad experience she had on one flight.

The best treatment for specific phobias is psychotherapy, known as exposure therapy. Exposure therapy focuses on changing one’s response to the situation that one fears. This type of therapy will involve Ester thinking about flying, next she will be looking at pictures of airports and planes. This exposes her to her fear (Botella et al., 2017). The next step will be going to the airport and eventually getting into a plane and not flying anywhere. Exposure therapy exposes the person to the situation they fear to help them deal with the fear and cope with it. Exposure therapy can also be combined with cognitive-behavioral therapy, which involves exposure and learning alternative beliefs about one’s fear. This will help Esther view flying differently and look at how her fear impacts her life and how she is supposed to overcome her fear to lead a normal life.

References

Botella, C., Fernández-Álvarez, J., Guillén, V., García-Palacios, A., & Baños, R. (2017). Recent progress in virtual reality exposure therapy for phobias: a systematic review. Current psychiatry reports, 19(7), 1-13.

Garcia, R. (2017). Neurobiology of fear and specific phobias. Learning & Memory, 24(9), 462-471.

Morrison, J. (2014). DSM-5® made easy: The clinician’s guide to diagnosis. Guilford Publications. https://dl.uswr.ac.ir/bitstream/Hannan/139644/1/9781462514427.pdf