Phobias: Are Fears Learned?

From simple phobias like that of snakes and insects to more complex ones of a social nature, it seems like all of us are affected by an intense fear in one way or another, directly or indirectly. What tends to evade us is how exactly these phobias come into being. Why is it that a young child may develop a fear of something as seemingly harmless as darkness, and continue to hold this fear on into their adult years? While most children at some point are were afraid of the dark, this child's unreasonable and persisting fear of the dark has landed it as a phobia. More than that, such a pervasive and lasting phobia has little chance of merely going away like the normal fears we gain and leave behind in childhood.

The answer to why nyctophobia (fear of the darkness) developed in the aforementioned said child, behaviorists turn to classical conditioning. This Pavlovian concept asserts the idea that people acquire fears through associations with a bad experience. In our example with the child whose afraid of the dark, we might explain the fear because the child heard scary noises outside the window all night one night. Frightened, she cried for her mother, but unheard and too scared to get out of bed she hid under the covers all night. By morning, the psychological damage was complete. According to Pavlov, the fear was an unconditioned response to the noises outside, the unconditioned stimulus. The conditioned response (learned response) was the fear of darkness which developed as a result of the fact that the darkness was associated with the noises which elicited such fear. This is classical conditioning.

Modeling is the second explanation for the development of a phobia. While this may seem like a simple explanation, it seems to hold water. The term modeling refers to the observation and imitation of one individual. This is common in the development of phobias in children. For example, a young girl witnesses her mother acting out an intense fear of dirt and bacteria. She sees her mother constantly washing her hands and cleaning the house. The child is then at risk of acquire a similar fear. This is because the modeling of the parent, and because the child is likely to avoid confronting the fear as much as possible. In this case, the child will probably wash their hands and keep their belongings as clean as possible, which means they are unlikely to notice that cleanliness without the obsessive aspect won't hurt them; and they surely won't notice that a little dirt won't hurt them.

To make matters worse, classical conditioning asserts a concept called stimulus generalization that can make phobias worse. Stimulus generalization is when the response to one stimulus is carried over to another. In the case of the child afraid of the dark, she may carry over her fear of darkness to the color black, or even dark colors entirely. Now instead of merely being afraid of the darkness, she cannot even look at dark color since they elicit the same fearful and anxious response that the darkness does. This sort of stimulus generalization is not only responsible for an individual's gaining of phobias, but it is also responsible for the acquisition of anxiety problems. Too many phobias make can make life tying to deal with. Anxiety may become a common part of one's day.

While the aforementioned is only the behaviorist explanation, this Pavlovian approach sports the most support among each of the theories available. Not only this, but it seems that most people can relate to acquiring a phobia or an aversion to something due to classical conditioning.

Comer, R. J. (2005). Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology, 4^th Ed. New York, Worth Publishers.