Have you ever experienced feelings of excessive fear of something, a certain event or certain creatures? If it yes means you have the symptoms of phobia. When an excessive fear of this takes place continuously and the effect is very long and some even up for life, then it means you’re suffering from a mental illness called Phobia.
What is Phobia?
Phobia comes from the Greek “Phobos” meaning fear. These fears arise because of feelings of irrational, persistent fear of certain situations, objects, activities, or persons. The main symptoms of this disorder are the feeling of excessive, unreasonable desire to avoid the feared subject.
Phobias (in the sense of the clinical term) are the most common form of anxiety disorder. An American study by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 8.7% and 18.1% of Americans suffer from phobias. The study found that phobias were the most common mental illness among women in all age groups and the second most common illness among men older than 25.
What Causes of Phobias?
Generally the cause of Phobia comes from the tendency of a combination of external and internal events. Examples such as Arachnophobia (fear of spiders) and Ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) however, could also arise because of human evolution, the nature conditioned of fear certain creatures that could cause harm.
In a famous experiment, Martin Seligman experimented with ways to use classical conditioning to establish phobias of snakes and flowers. The results showed that it took far fewer shocks to create an adverse response with snakes instead of drawing pictures of flowers. The conclusion from these studies is that certain objects may have a genetic predisposition associated with fear.
In fact many specific phobias can be traced back and is usually found that the traumatic experience at an early age to be a trigger factor. In addition, it is believed that heredity, genetics, and brain chemistry along with life experience plays a major role in the development of anxiety disorders and phobias.
The use of other name
Phobia is also used in non-medical sense to hate all kinds. These terms are usually constructed with the suffix-phobia. A number of these terms describe negative attitudes or prejudices towards the subject named. See Non-clinical use of the terms below.
Anatomical side phobias
Phobia more often not associated with the amygdala, a brain region located behind the pituitary gland in the [limbic system]]. Amygdala releases the hormone that controls fear and aggression and assist in the interpretation of emotion in facial expressions of others. When fear or aggression response begins, the amygdala releases hormones into the body to make the human body becomes a “sign” of the state, where they are ready to move, running, fighting, etc.
Research has shown the difference between the response cycle of the people facing the object of phobia and those who face the dangerous objects that do not trigger phobia-like response. In one case, patients with Arachnophobia that are shown a picture of a spider (the object of fear) and snake (picture controls, which are intended to encourage a normal response). When lit, who answered with a short arachnophobe afraid of snakes, but quickly shut down the amygdala when the higher logical thinking to analyze the threat and ruled it as not important. However, when shown the spider, which arachnophobe’s amygdala reacted, and then do not stop out ‘alarm’ hormones, even after they have rationalized the situation they are in.
For this reason, phobias are generally classified as panic disorder by most psychologists, because it involves an unnatural or illogical brain function.