At least 60 percent of adults admit to having at least one unreasonable fear, although research to date is not clear on why these fears manifest. One theory is that humans have a genetic predisposition to fear things that were a threat to our ancestors, such as snakes, spiders, heights, or water, but this is difficult to verify, although people who have a first-degree relative with a specific phobia appear more likely to have the same one. Others point to evidence that individuals fear certain things because of a previous traumatic experience with them, but that fails to explain the many fears without such origins.
Personality traits such as neuroticism appear to increase one's likelihood of developing a phobia, and a tendency toward frequent worries and negative thoughts may also increase the risk, as may being raised by overprotective parents, losing a parent, or sexual or physical abuse. Most likely is that people follow multiple pathways to fears, not least among them the emotional response of disgust.
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A phobia is a distinct fear or anxiety about a certain object or situation, exposure to which consistently provokes fear or causes distress in the sufferer. The fear experienced is almost always disproportionate to the true danger the object or event poses, and people with specific phobias generally know there is no real reason to be afraid and that their behavior is not logical. However, they cannot avoid their reaction.
Agoraphobia is the fear of situations that would be difficult to escape from or from which it would be difficult to get help, such as being in a movie theater or subway car. People with agoraphobia may fear public transportation, open spaces such as bridges, enclosed spaces like elevators, crowded places like concerts, and being away from home in general. Sufferers may become highly distressed when they find themselves in such situations and will go out of their way to avoid them.
Fear of heights is a common phobia, and one that is often experienced intensely. In fact, the symptoms often mirror those of a panic attack, including trembling, sweaty palms, nausea, and dizziness. Some have this phobia because of a traumatic experience but research suggests that, for many others, this fear, and similar ones such as claustrophobia, is a consequence of being more acutely aware of their bodily sensations than others, and more likely to interpret those sensations as threatening, leading to negative thoughts about jumping, losing their balance, or having a heart attack.
Tokophobia, or the fear of pregnancy and/or childbirth, is a longtime phobia but one that has only recently been seriously researched. It affects both women who have experienced pregnancy and those who have not. Sufferers can experience terror, panic, or intense disgust at the very idea of becoming pregnant, leading to difficulty in forming romantic relationships and depriving women of the family they sincerely desire to have. (Women who simply do not desire children do not have tokophobia.)
When fear disrupts or overtakes an individual's life, therapy can help. A core treatment for fears is exposure therapy, in which a therapist guides the client to gradually and repeatedly engage with the source of their phobia in a safe environment to help strip away the threat associated with it. For example, someone with a fear of flying may be prompted to think about planes, view pictures of planes, visit the airport, step onto a plane, and eventually complete a flight. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is often applied in combination with exposure therapy, to help sufferers challenge and reframe their harmful beliefs.
Medication such as beta-blockers, which block adrenaline and lower heart rate and blood pressure, may be prescribed in the short-term, often when a feared situation is necessary or unavoidable, such as before a public speaking commitment.
Using the technology of virtual reality to simulate exposure to fears has emerged as a useful therapeutic tool. Evidence suggests that Virtual Reality Graded Exposure Therapy (VRGET) can be especially helpful in addressing concerns like specific phobias, agoraphobia, and anxiety disorders. Patient outcomes appear to be no different in virtual and real settings, but VR may enable therapists to reach more people with accessible and affordable care.
Fear is an intensely unpleasant emotion in response to perceiving or recognizing a danger or threat. Fear causes physiological changes that may produce behavioral reactions such as mounting an aggressive response or fleeing the threat. Fear in human beings may occur in response to a certain stimulus occurring in the present, or in anticipation or expectation of a future threat perceived as a risk to oneself. The fear response arises from the perception of danger leading to confrontation with or escape from/avoiding the threat (also known as the fight-or-flight response), which in extreme cases of fear (horror and terror) can be a freeze response.
In humans and other animals, fear is modulated by the process of cognition and learning. Thus, fear is judged as rational and appropriate, or irrational and inappropriate. An irrational fear is called a phobia.
Fear is closely related to the emotion anxiety, which occurs as the result of often future threats that are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable.[1] The fear response serves survival by engendering appropriate behavioral responses, so it has been preserved throughout evolution.[2] Sociological and organizational research also suggests that individuals' fears are not solely dependent on their nature but are also shaped by their social relations and culture, which guide their understanding of when and how much fear to feel.[3][page needed]
Fear is sometimes incorrectly considered the opposite of courage. For the reason that courage is a willingness to face adversity, fear is an example of a condition that makes the exercise of courage possible.[citation needed]
Many physiological changes in the body are associated with fear, summarized as the fight-or-flight response. An innate response for coping with danger, it works by accelerating the breathing rate (hyperventilation), heart rate, vasoconstriction of the peripheral blood vessels leading to blood pooling, increasing muscle tension including the muscles attached to each hair follicle to contract and causing "goosebumps", or more clinically, piloerection (making a cold person warmer or a frightened animal look more impressive), sweating, increased blood glucose (hyperglycemia), increased serum calcium, increase in white blood cells called neutrophilic leukocytes, alertness leading to sleep disturbance and "butterflies in the stomach" (dyspepsia). This primitive mechanism may help an organism survive by either running away or fighting the danger.[4] With the series of physiological changes, the consciousness realizes an emotion of fear.
There are observable physical reactions in individuals who experience fear. An individual might experience a feeling of dizziness, lightheaded, like they are being choked, sweating, shortness of breath, vomiting or nausea, numbness or shaking and any other like symptoms. These bodily reactions informs the individual that they are afraid and should proceed to remove or get away from the stimulus that is causing that fear.[5]
An influential categorization of stimuli causing fear was proposed by psychologist Jeffrey Alan Gray;[6] namely, intensity, novelty, special evolutionary dangers, stimuli arising during social interaction, and conditioned stimuli.[7] Another categorization was proposed by Archer,[8] who, besides conditioned fear stimuli, categorized fear-evoking (as well as aggression-evoking) stimuli into three groups; namely, pain, novelty, and frustration, although he also described "looming", which refers to an object rapidly moving towards the visual sensors of a subject, and can be categorized as "intensity". Russell[9] described a more functional categorization of fear-evoking stimuli, in which for instance novelty is a variable affecting more than one category: 1) Predator stimuli (including movement, suddenness, proximity, but also learned and innate predator stimuli); 2) Physical environmental dangers (including intensity and heights); 3) Stimuli associated with increased risk of predation and other dangers (including novelty, openness, illumination, and being alone); 4) Stimuli stemming from conspecifics (including novelty, movement, and spacing behavior); 5) Species-predictable fear stimuli and experience (special evolutionary dangers); and 6) Fear stimuli that are not species predictable (conditioned fear stimuli).
Although many fears are learned, the capacity to fear is part of human nature. Many studies[10] have found that certain fears (e.g. animals, heights) are much more common than others (e.g. flowers, clouds). These fears are also easier to induce in the laboratory. This phenomenon is known as preparedness. Because early humans that were quick to fear dangerous situations were more likely to survive and reproduce; preparedness is theorized to be a genetic effect that is the result of natural selection.[11]
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, different fears may be different adaptations that have been useful in our evolutionary past. They may have developed during different time periods. Some fears, such as fear of heights, may be common to all mammals and developed during the mesozoic period. Other fears, such as fear of snakes, may be common to all simians and developed during the cenozoic time period (the still-ongoing geological era encompassing the last 66 million of history). Still others, such as fear of mice and insects, may be unique to humans and developed during the paleolithic and neolithic time periods (when mice and insects become important carriers of infectious diseases and harmful for crops and stored foods).[12]
Nonhuman animals and humans innovate specific fears as a result of learning. This has been studied in psychology as fear conditioning, beginning with John B. Watson's Little Albert experiment in 1920, which was inspired after observing a child with an irrational fear of dogs. In this study, an 11-month-old boy was conditioned to fear a white rat in the laboratory. The fear became generalized to include other white, furry objects, such as a rabbit, dog, and even a Santa Claus mask with white cotton balls in the beard. 006ab0faaa
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