Psychology, like any subject, has presented drastic changes and improvements over the past decades along with ways to improve daily life. The subject evolved from the psychodynamic approach which focuses on what happens in the mind, where it is believed that our behavior is established due to unconscious thoughts. However, lacking scientific evidence, many criticized psychodynamic theorists like Freud and turned to behaviorist psychologists like Watson (1913), who revolutionized the subject by encouraging observable behavior in the early 20th century that was more scientific than psychodynamic theories of the unconscious. and the conscious mind. Finally, we later introduced the cognitive approach which focused on the thought processes in the mind, allowing psychologists to gain understanding and knowledge through aspects such as thinking, senses and our experiences. Recent technological advances have allowed us to approach the subject in a more reductionist and scientific way, such as the interactions between neurons in the brain, now known as the biological approach. This essay will focus on the comparison and contrasting factors of the biological and behavioral approach by discussing, for example, anomalies and comparing the different explanations of each of the approaches. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay The contrasting and diverse approaches help psychologists take each case as its own and analyze it fully by examining all possible reasonings behind the behavior and/or actions. . According to Marshelle Thobaben (2004), a phobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by extreme irrational fear of a situation or object and eventually leading to life-changing consequences due to avoidance, e.g. agoraphobia – a fear of going places where one may panic and feel trapped. Mowrer (1947) used both classical conditioning and operant conditioning to explain the development of a phobia which is now commonly referred to as avoidance conditioning. This concept comes from the behaviorist approach. This theory states that, through classical conditioning, the feared object/situation is associated with panic and fear. Therefore, through operant conditioning, fear is regulated and continues as the individual becomes familiar with the fact that their fear is reduced by avoiding the situation/object that causes the panic. This is an example of negative reinforcement because when the individual does not come into contact with the stimulus, there is little or no anxiety. Similarly, Watson and Rayner (1920) found that using classical conditioning, they were able to associate little (9-month-old) Albert's fear of loud noises with a white rat, of which he had no fear before. They wanted to test the idea that through the following procedure - classical conditioning - he could use the unconditioned response to condition a child to fear the distinctive stimulus that would not normally be feared by a child. This proved that a phobia could develop through association. Additionally, this study also concluded that the phobia can be generalized to objects of a similar nature. In Little Albert's case, he continued to fear white furry rat-like objects, such as cotton. However, the biological explanation has proven that genetics has a cause in phobias. The biomedical/genetic approach explains phobias by asking questions such as:.