What About Bob Essay Example

must murder Bob to rid him from his life and involvement with his family. After a failed attempt to murder and then to institutionalize Bob, an utterly disturbed Dr. Marvin seeks mental health refuge himself from the madness his own patient has inflicted. The most salient characteristics that serve as the foundation of the overall personality of Bob Wiley revolves around his crippling anxiety.

Bob is excessively worrisome, prone to panic, melodramatic, obsessive, and dependent to the point of clinginess. The Big Five trait approach believes that personality can be encapsulated in five facets – extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. According to the Big Five, neuroticism, also known as emotional instability, encompasses nervousness, tension, and anxiety. From this contemporary trait perspective, Bob Wiley undoubtedly has higher than normal levels of neuroticism.

His phobias of many germs, heart attacks, exploding bladders, and social situations during which these could be experienced interfere with his ability to live a normal life. For example, Bob would rather climb over forty flights of stairs instead of get in an elevator with other people in it. However, he also would score high on conscientiousness. While constantly overrun by his phobias, Bob is dependable, cautious (though excessively due to his fears), and obviously persistent. One former therapist boasted these aspects as a way to convince Dr.

Marvin to take Bob on as a patient, praising his punctuality and early payment habits. Similarly, Bob is imaginative, friendly, trusting, and cooperative, and therefore would fare well on levels of openness and agreeableness, though his therapists may disagree with the latter. His high conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness allow for Bob to

work his way into the hearts of Dr. Marvin’s family, neighbors, and all those that witnessed his interview on Good Morning America. His generally pleasant demeanor and lively spirit allows others to overlook his pervasive worries and eccentric behaviors.

From a behavioral perspective, many of Bob’s anxieties have been strengthened by reinforcements he has created in his mind. Bob believes that if he pretends to have a condition and enacts its effects, like cardiac arrest or Tourette’s, then the fear of it will temporary subside. Behaviorists like John Watson and B. F. Skinner that studied operant conditioning, the principle of behavior being influenced by its consequences, would say that relief from fear is providing negative reinforcement for those strange actions, increasing the likelihood that Bob will behave like that on future occasions.

Also, apparently, social misunderstanding or being perceived in a negative manner by others for his conduct does not serve as a punisher to Bob, which would make him less likely to go through with his induced fits of fake symptoms. This conditioning feeds Bob’s personality as a tense, distressed, histrionic, and somewhat bizarre. Psychologists like Hull, Dollard, and Miller that were involved with social learning and habits would that Bob has learned secondary drives and responses that influence his personality and behaviors.

These drives are associated with their outcomes, much like operant conditioning, and links to primary needs and sensations, but emphasize the individual’s internal processes. This means Bob “ranks” the importance of reinforcement and situations in order to generate his response. For Bob Wiley, gaining the attention from his therapist and the counsel he so gravely seeks are rated

as some of the most important rewards he can receive and therefore is clingy and intrusive.

In the article, “Social Phobia Subtyping with the MMPI-2”, the researchers examined patients with social phobias and their scores on the second version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, dividing them into categories based on their preliminary socially phobic variances and the clinical findings. What they found were that people in the “third cluster” had primarily neurotic symptoms, characterized by high anxiety, prone to overreacting, inhibition, and insecurity. Also, these subjects tended to have higher scores related to immature and dependent thought processes.

This cluster seems a fitting description of Bob Wiley and would probably where he’d be placed. In their study, the researchers found that the individuals in the third cluster indicated the most situations as anxiety-producing, were the most likely to have co-morbid conditions and to be single, and had the greatest improvement in family functioning after therapy. Bob, aside from having multiple, co-morbid phobias, may also suffer from a type of personality disorder, though it’s not completely apparent and would require more in-depth analysis.

He shows traces of histrionic and dependent personality types, but it is questionable whether they could meet diagnostic criteria. Also, Bob is divorced and somewhat delusional and in denial about its causes, but by the end of his experience with Dr. Marvin and his family, develops a new relationship and marries Leo’s sister. The similarities between the third cluster and Bob Wiley could suggest that personality can be indicative of possible phobias and psychopathology and there is a relationship between the two.