On nonassociative fear emergence.
Poulton and Menzies have articulated a nonassociative alternative to traditional conditioning theories of phobia emergence. Prompted by their essay, I address several issues including controversies about what counts as a conditioning event, difficulties establishing whether a fear functioned as an adaptation throughout evolutionary history, hazards of attempting to recover conditioning events in the histories of patients, and problems with the contingency view of associative learning.
McNally
Richard J
RJ
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. rjm@wjh.harvard.edu
D003213:Conditioning, Psychological; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D011582:Psychological Theory