Phobias Chapter 15

Introduction: Almost everyone has an irrational fear or two—of mice, for example, or your annual dental checkup. For most people, these fears are minor. But when fears become so severe that they cause tremendous anxiety and interfere with your normal life, they’re called phobias. A phobia is an intense fear of something that, in reality, poses little or no actual danger. Common phobias and fears include closed-in places, heights, highway driving, flying insects, snakes, and needles. However, we can develop phobias of virtually anything. Most phobias develop in childhood, but they can also develop in adults. If you

Just imagine for a moment that you have a cynophobia or the fear of dogs, would this be how you would feel. Driving down the road the oil light comes on. "I must stop the car to add more oil or I will damage the car engine. This looks like a good place to pull over. I'll just stop in front of this house. The oil is in the trunk, so I'll pop the top first, then get the oil out of the trunk. OK, I have the oil, but what if there is a dog at this house. Hurry, I have to hurry. A dog might come running out and bark at me any minute. Just get the oil in the engine. I can't my hands are shaking. Don't worry, there is no dog. Just get the oil in the engine. I don't care

A phobia is a persistent and unreasonable fear of an object or situation which can initiate an anxiety response such as a panic attack or crying and freezing in children – the response is out of proportion to the threat posed. The sufferer is aware that their fear is unreasonable, causing distress, but also distinguishing the disorder from schizophrenia and psychosis. The anxiety response includes dizziness and difficulty breathing and is maladaptive as avoidance or distress in response to the feared situation or object interferes considerably with the individual’s daily routine. For those under 18, symptoms have to be present for at least 6 months and cannot be better explained by the criteria of another

Phobic disorders are objects, places, things that people develop a fear of that are not realistically dangerous. People often develop this usually from one past experience. Many people have arachnophobia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, and hydrophobia. There is some strange phobias that people develop like homophobia, fear of long words, fear of popping balloons and fear that somewhere a duck is watching you. I don’t know if it was from when I was a child but I fear that people are going to let go of their balloons or pop them, which is very strange. My friend has agoraphobia which greatly affected her social life, and only last year got over it to find a job and be able to shop by herself. I used to have to drag her into town when I needed to go and if she saw someone we knew she would hide, and would even run out of the store.

Phobia in clinical psychology context is an irrational fear of something or situation. The person suffering from phobia will try their best to avoid their phobia. In the extreme case that the person suffering from the phobia cannot avoid it, they will attempt to endure through the situation with a lot of distress ADDIN EN.CITE Swanson1986158(Swanson, 1986)15815817Swanson, Guy E.Phobias and Related Symptoms: Some Social SourcesSociological ForumSociological Forum103-130111986Springer08848971http://www.jstor.org/stable/684555( HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_2" o "Swanson, 1986 #158" Swanson, 1986). Phobias can cause difficulties in a person performing their daily activities.

For example if a child sees its mother reacting in a fearful way towards a spider they too will react in that particular way. Evidence for this comes from Bandura who observed the reactions of fake electrical shocks been given with a buzzer. Maneeka found that when mothers reacted to snakes in a bad way the child developed a phobia of snakes in later life. There are demand characteristics with this research, as the researchers will be expecting a particular outcome and the people may already have a fear of a particular object or situation. Also the outcomes cannot be applied to every phobia i.e. claustrophobia therefore it is limited.

In everyday life, anxiety is an adaptive response to deal with short-term threatening, dangerous or emergency situations (Grivas & Letch, 2017). This can temporarily activate the sympathetic nervous system and the fight-flight-freeze response, causing physiological symptoms of dizziness, trembling, shortness of breath and increased heart rate. Stress and anxiety may be seen in other mental disorders, such as specific phobia, but are not considered mental disorders. Specific phobia is a phobia “marked by persistent fear or anticipation of a specific situation in which exposure to the phobic stimulus almost invariably provokes an immediate anxiety response” (Grös & Antony, 2006). Specific phobias can be categorised into four main types ,animal type, natural environment type, blood-injection-injury type and situation type.

There are fears which are healthy and can be separated from extended fears in phobias. The patient in phobia case feels troubled with overstated, unreasonable fear and anxiety confronting direct contact with a certain object the lift and situation that stimulate immediately panic attack. The possibility of exposing their certain fear or certain situation could have an effect on the nature of response (Flykt, 2005). Mrs. F also is conscious that this situation of anxiety is irrational and it does affect in her daily life with a matter of phobia reaction. According to some researches if this phobia it lasts up to six months then it is classified in the group of suffering from phobia disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

Phobic disorders are one of the most common forms of psychiatric illness. There are so many different phobias. Some examples are, Social Anxiety Disorder, Agoraphobia: the fear of being alone in public places, Cynophobia: the fear of dogs, and Arachnophobia: the fear of spiders. Anxiety is a big common factor when experiencing phobic disorders. A disorder can start off really small and not be that big of a problem, but over time it can increase and get

According to Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, & Nock (2015) There are three different forms of phobic disorders; specific phobia, social phobia, and agoraphobia. Specific phobia is when someone is afraid of something like an animal, or heights

Specific phobia is the disproportionate fear or avoidance of a particular object or situation. Phobias are intense, unreasonable fears that interfere with functioning. Anxiety and fear are common to be a part of most of the other anxiety disorders like social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and agoraphobia. The development and maintenance of a specific phobia can be the result of fear conditioning. The behavioral model of specific phobia is based upon the assumption that thoughts and beliefs can influence our own behavior, emotions, and physiology. This model is built from Mowrer’s two-factor model of conditioning. The learned preparedness model suggests that fears of objects with evolutionary significance may be more sustained after condition. Although not all people with negative experiences will develop phobias.

However, there is a fear induced by the mind which is called Phobia. Phobia comes from the Greek word “Phobos” that means fear. This type of fear is known as irrational or inappropriate since it is caused by pure imagination. Most common phobias are the fear of evil powers, snakes, enclosed spaces, water, spiders and heights.

Phobias are anxiety disorders. Phobias are excessive fears of specific things or situations. Fear of heights (acrophobia’s) is a hyper-reaction and survival mechanism of a fear response. Often it is learned response from a previous

Known as a mental disorder a phobia is a persistent fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to compelling desire to avoid it. Phobias tend to affect the way people live their lives, for example, their working and social environments, considering that they last for a very long time and are capable to cause intense psychological physical stress. It is considered today the most common mental and anxiety disorder in the United States (Matig Mavissakalian & David H. Barlow 1981 pp 2). There are many phobias such as: the fear of aging, fear of changing, fear of clowns, fear of getting fat, fear of being in closed spaces, etc.

Thereby it is not completely clear, what the causes for phobia are. Phobia is often caused by something scary that happened earlier in somebody’s life, but not every one develop phobias after special experiences. An explanation for this could be that for some people certain parts of the brain and specific neural pathways are associated with phobias. It is