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On nonassociative fear emergence
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. rjm@wjh.harvard.edu
Behaviour Research and Therapy
|January 30, 2002
Abstract:
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.