Frightened Children : Phobias And Childhood

Specific phobia, also known as simple phobia, is an anxiety disorder characterized by persistent and unreasonable fear of something or fear of a situation, wherein such fear is not proportionate to the danger or risk of that thing or situation that a person has the fear of. The five sub-type of specific phobia are the animal, natural environment, blood injection injury, situational and others. The most common specific phobia is the animal phobia. Examples of this animal phobia include fear of dogs, snakes, insects or mice. To prevent over diagnosis of specific phobia, DSM 5 have made several changes based on the over assessment of danger or erratic fear. To be considered as one of the specific phobias, it should meet the requirements

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.

“While biological factors certainly increase the vulnerability to developing fear and phobia, findings have not yet confirmed that these behaviors are controlled by biological mechanisms” (Rofé). Treating and understanding, psychoanalysis, phobias are believed to be a defense mechanism against trauma that might have been brought up as child. It still debated wether phobias are biological or created through life experiences. Due to varied experiments and evaluation, stating phobias derive from young childhood traumas would be untruthful and not factual. In the theory of psychoanalytic fear and phobias are created if the child remembers the experience which have brought

Though the experience of phobias is relatively common and their physical characteristics are generally well understood, there is no real consensus on the neurobiological basis of phobias. Instead, there are currently several different models and theories that work to try to understand how and why phobias occur in the human brain. Most hypotheses regarding phobias take a different approach, from biological to psychoanalytic to evolutionary. Is there one model that seems "less wrong" or more satisfying in our efforts to understand the biology of phobias? Using the various models, how do phobias seem to come about? How does thinking about phobias add to our understanding of the brain and behavior?

Phobias, an extreme fear of something, can best be understood through use of the psychodynamic perspective. Oftentimes, childhood traumas or exposure to the object of the fear at an early age can lead to the phobia to manifest itself when the patient is an adult.

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

A phobia is an overwhelming and unbearable fear of something, such as an object, place, situation, feeling or animal. Phobias are a lot profounder than fears. In my essay I will be looking at a scenario of a woman called Amy with an extreme phobia of birds and how we can explain her fear looking at different psychological theories that explains learnt behaviour.

A phobia can be acquired by a person by making the person associate one thing with something not pleasant or painful to them. The effect of this can be permanent if the extinction process on the person

“A phobia is essentially a human being's irrational fear of something. It could be an object, an animal, a situation or an environment. These fears are persistent, intense, excessive and unrealistic, which is primarily why phobias are deemed irrational. A clinically phobic person's reaction to what scares him/her may seem extreme and the fright may not appear to be justified.” (Grenier et al., 2011) A specific phobia is known by a deep and persistent fear of an object or situation which becomes anxiety. The anticipations of the stimulus may make the symptoms arise. Many individuals who suffer with this disease will avoid the stimuli. They will take extra steps and precaution to have no contact. The main characteristics that the DSM-5 describes for this disorder includes “the individual suffering from a persistent fear that is either unreasonable or excessive, caused by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation, exposure to the stimulus usually results in an anxiety response, the sufferer recognizes that their fear is disproportionate to the perceived threat or danger, individuals take steps to avoid the object or situation they fear, and the phobic reaction, anticipation or avoidance interferes with the individual’s normal routine and relationships, or causes significant distress. At last, the phobia that the person has to be constant for a period of six months or longer.” (American Psychiatric Association,

I would classically condition a fearful preschooler to enjoy playing with the neighbor's dog by having the dog to play with a favorite item the child enjoys playing such as a ball. For instance, when the dog begins to play with the ball, the child would immediately begin to feel excitement because a friendly animal interacts with the child favorite item, thus making the child interact with the animal and not feel so frighten. The US will be to feel fearful when interacting with a dog; The CS will be the favorite item; the UR is enjoying, and the CR will be the dog playing with the child's favorite item. The NS will be recalling events of the favorite ball but not seeing the neighbors friendly dog playing with it.

Certain fears are common for certain ages. Children from ages 0-4 are mostly afraid of strangers, loud noises, and being alone. Children around the age of 5 or 6 are afraid of imaginary things, such as monsters, or vampires. They are also afraid of sleeping alone, the dark, and large animals. As children mature, they become more aware of more realistic fears such as death, blood, injuries, and being home alone. These fears usually last the longest. Common fears for children 9-12 years are school related fears, fears of getting injured, or fears of how they look. These are very normal, but if they happen to get in the way of hobbies or everyday activities, it becomes an emotional

Phobias, fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of death; everyone has something that makes them feel so uncomfortable that their body reacts with fear and anxiety. The fear comes from a sense of what if; what if that spider bit me, what if I fell off the roof? Having fear is a human experience that we can’t avoid. That goes for me as well, a phobia that I would say affects my life would be a fear of confined spaces, that feeling of I can’t get out or I can’t move. This terror is common and known as claustrophobia. For some claustrophobia can be so debilitating to ones life that they must seek help from a therapist. Therapist vary and can treat a persons phobia with a number of different techniques depending on their specialty.

However, phobia can even cause people to risk their health. For example, the fear of dentists can leave people suffering from it willing to risk the health of their teeth in order to avoid having to go through an exam or procedure ( MacKay). When one knows about an upcoming confrontation, it can be the reason why one can not sleep or finds it hard to focus on important tasks. Due the change in daily routine, this unrealistic fear can interfere with the ability to socialize, work, or go about everyday life, brought on by and object, event or situation. But even animals have anxieties and phobias just as every human being (www.phobia-help.de). A phobia is an irrational fear, one knows that the object or situation, one is scared off, can not hurt one, but one is still afraid. A reason for this is that the human mind can not distinguish what is real and imaginary. When one has uncontrollable anxiety attacks, he loses rational judgement, leading to complicated problems. However, anyone can develop a phobia, men and women, teens and young adults, and elderly lady or a one-year-old boy (MacKay).

A lot of people around as suffer form different types of phobia like social phobia, agoraphobia, animal’s phobia, situations phobia and others types as it was discussed in the main research. The person who has phobia will experience some signs and symptoms and there are 2 types of signs the emotional and the physical signs. The causes of phobia differ from a person to another; some people suffer from phobia because of a family issues or bad experiences in their life. And finally, Phobias are a serious problem but if the person knows how to deal with it and the signs to start the treatment it won’t be a problem in their

Luckily most of us suffer from seemingly less harmful phobias that may not trigger an emotional outpour every day of our lives. Due to the unlikeliness of confrontation some people are able to live their lives avoiding phobias they might have procured. For example, a more common phobia known would be Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. Although you may be completely terrified of clowns, you do not wake up every morning knowing you have to face one. You do however have to draw comprise whenever carnival time comes around. Even though you may completely adore the amenities of a festival you steer clear of the park to avoid any clowns, sacrificing amusement to bypass fear.