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Rebecca Steffey
Professor Donegan
Research Summary 4
27 April 2015
Relaxing Your Fears Away
In the reading Relaxing your fears away we learn from the work of Joseph Wolpe that
there can be a way to treat different types of phobias. He explains to us that phobias are a fear to
something that you believe is going to be very dangerous to you, and harm you. He then goes on
to explain that there can be two main different types of phobias that people deal with. Such as
simple phobias, social phobias. Wolpe tells us that all these phobias are treatable by the use of
the systematic desensitization, a behavioral technique. In the article Joseph Wolpe, Famous
psychologist, it says Wolpe reasoned that much of our behavior is learned.
Wolpe decided to do a study on seeing if his way of treating phobias would actually
work. He starts out by using a rat which had been conditioned to be scared when seeing a picture
of a rat. Although they started putting food by the picture of the cat so eventually the rat would
have no fear of the cat whatsoever. He wants to use deep relaxation training to help the rat realize
that the cat was not harmful. Wolpe believed that the reason you have a phobia is that you
learned it sometime in your life through the process of classical conditioning, by which some
object became associated in your brain with intense fear (Hock 2013, p.264). Wolpe then had 39
random cases that he treated using his belief of systematic desensitization.
The type of method that Wolpe used in his cases was a case study. The study of the object
was Wolpe studying the relaxation of his cases. He would get more in depth with their phobia,
but as soon as they dont feel relaxed they needed to raise one finger, he would then put them
back into a relaxed state and continue with the in depth phobias that person might have. He goes

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onto go explain that hypnosis was used into the treatment to help the full relaxation effect. What
he uses in his study is something called systematic desensitization. According to the website
Simple Psychology is tells us that simple desensitization is way to remove fear and types of
phobias. It is done by classical conditioning and was developed by Wolpe in the 1950s. (Simple
Psychology, 2008) But since this summary has been done they say it is not needed for the
effective results and the relaxation can come naturally to people. Next Wolpe says that you need
to go through and make a list of the situations that make you have the anxiety or phobia. He says
you need to make the list until you get to the most anxiety producing event. After the list Wolpe
says you need to unlearn the phobia. He says you can do this by description and visualizations.
So did Wolpes method work? Wolpe says that in all 39 cases he took care of a total of 68
cases were actually treated during the study. Only 9% of the studies were unsuccessful. Wolpe
says that in his study those 9% had very special problems that was hard for him to help. Most of
Wolpes cases reported that they were either completely successful or partially successful. Wolpe
says that his methods were only treating the symptoms but not the causes. He also says that
after four years those 25 to 35 patients said that they have never had a relapse or new phobias
occurring.
These findings are important, because phobias are a real problem in our society today. I
think people deal with them every day, and especially anxiety. But if more people know how to
deal with it themselves then I could help them for the rest of their lives. Dealing with anxiety and
different phobias can really have an impact on someones life. Helping them can really change
the way they look at things. It applies to the text book because the textbook tells us that by
pairing the old conditioned stimulus with a new relaxation response that is incompatible with the

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emotions and physical arousal associated with fear, the persons fear will be reduced. It tells us
that the systematic desensitization is a way to help relax the fears and phobias away.
I can use this information to lead a better life, because people with these types of phobias
dont know how to get help or where. And by reading this summary I now know that I can help
someone by explaining systematic desensitization to them and maybe letting them know what
its about. So then maybe it can help them get over there phobias and not need to worry about
them anymore. Just like the title says it will help them relax their fears away, but with Joseph
Wolpes findings hopefully they can relax them away forever.

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Works Cited
Ciccarelli, Saundra & Noland, J White. (2014) Psychology. New Jersey: Pearson
Hock, Roger, R. (2013) Forty Studies That Changed Psychology. Boston, MA: Pearson
Psychologist Anywhere Anytime. (2005) Famous Psychologist: Joseph Wolpe. Retrieved from

http://www.psychologistanywhereanytime.com/famous_psychologist_and_psychologists/psychol
ogist_famous_joseph_wolpe.htm
Simple Psychology. (2008) Systematic Desensitization. Retrieved from
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.html

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