Is Fear Or Phobia? Essay

A phobia is an extreme or irrational fear of something. Many phobias are in relation to one another. As people, we must realize that phobias cannot be fixed by ourselves. In order to help individuals that we may encounter, we must completely understand phobias. We cannot judge them for something they cannot help. To help an individual feel more at ease it is our job to know the causes, effects, impacts, and treatments of their phobia. This would help to completely understand the phobia and in the end, help us all to support each

Fear is one of the strongest emotions for every human being; like love or hate it can distort our mind, causing us to not think or act logically in different circumstances.

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.

Everybody that you come into contact with on a daily basis will have a fear of something but a phobia can be defined as an irrational fear, this can provoke feelings of intense anxiety and initiate avoidance behaviour.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Phobia is a persistent, abnormal or irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid the feared stimulus. Phobias are largely underreported. An estimated 6 million people

Phobia is an acquired fear whenever we sense danger or when we are confronted with something new or unknown that seems potentially dangerous. It can be social anxiety disorder which characterized by excessive fear or anxiety about one or more social situations or specific phobia that developed when a person has an encounter with an object or situation that involves or provokes fear. Phobias vary in severity among individuals. Although phobias are common, they do not necessarily cause significant disruption of everyday activities.

A phobia is one of the most common mental disorder in the world, including closed in places, highway, driving, fly insects, snakes and needles. Most phobia develop in childhood, but they can also be in adults. Worldwide, it is the main cause for not going to

In general, a phobia refers to “extreme [and] irrational fear reactions” (Powell, Honey, & Symbaluk, 2013, p. 190). Phobias are developed through a process called classical conditioning. Classical conditioning involves “a process in which one stimulus that does not elicit a certain response is associated with a second stimulus that does; as a result, the first stimulus also comes to elicit a response” (Powell et al., 2013, pp. 109-110).

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).

According to my dictionary, Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. When the word "fear" comes to my mind, I think of an emotion that's caused by a bad situation. There are many things in this world that put fear in me. My greatest fears are computer viruses, thugs, sick people, and clowns. Each of these fears make me very scared and give me goosebumps.