Psychiatry identifies three different categories of phobias (DSM-IV,1994):

Agoraphobia
(with panic attacks): 300.21
(without panic attacks): 300.01
Irrational anxiety about being in places from which escape might be difficult or embarrassing.

Social phobia: 300.23
Irrational anxiety elicited by exposure to certain types of social or performance situations, also leading to avoidance behavior.

Specific phobia: 300.29
Persistent and irrational fear in the presence of some specific stimulus which commonly elicits avoidance of that stimulus, i.e., withdrawal.
SUBTYPES:

* animal type - cued by animals or insects
* natural environment type - cued by objects in the environment, such as storms, heights, or water
* blood-injection-injury type - cued by witnessing some invasive medical procedure
* situational type - cued by a specific situation, such as public transportation, tunnels, bridges, elevators, flying, driving, or enclosed spaces
* other type - cued by other stimuli than the above, such as of choking, vomiting, or contracting an illness

By definition, phobias are IRRATIONAL, meaning that they interfere with one's everyday life or daily routine. For example, if your fear of high places prevents you from crossing necessary bridges to get to work, that fear is irrational. If your fears keep you from enjoying life or even preoccupy your thinking so that you are unable to work, or sleep, or do the things you wish to do, then it becomes irrational.

One key to diagnosing a phobic disorder is that the fear must be excessive and disproportionate to the situation. Most people who fear heights would not avoid visiting a friend who lived on the top floor of a tall building; a person with a phobia of heights would, however. Fear alone does not distinguish a phobia; both fear and avoidance must be evident. (Lefton, L. A., 1997)

The Freudians speculate that as young children agoraphobics may have feared abandonment by a cold or nonnurturing mother and the fear has generalized to a fear of abandonment or helplessness. By contrast, modern learning theory suggests that agoraphobia may develop because people avoid situations they have found painful or embarrassing. Also, failed coping strategies and low self-esteem have been implicated (Williams, Kinney, & Falbo, 1989). Other research (Ost & Hugdahl, 1981) suggests that almost half of all people with phobias have never had a painful experience with the object they fear. Perhaps we hear that someone has been injured by a snake, for example, and we become afraid too. Almost no one is afraid of cars, even though almost everyone has experienced or witnessed a car accident in which someone got injured. As Martin Seligman (1971) put it, people may be inherently "prepared" to learn certain phobias. For millions of years people who quickly learned to avoid snakes, heights, and lightning probably have had a good chance to survive and to transmit their genes. We have not had enough time to evolve a tendency to fear cars and guns.

Another possible explanation is that people generally develop phobias for objects they cannot predict or control. Danger is more stressful when it takes us by surprise (Mineka, 1985; Mineka, Cook, & Miller, 1984). Lightning is unpredictable and uncontrollable. In contrast, you don't have to worry that electric outlets will take you by surprise, so it's not likely that you'll have an "electric outlet phobia."

Humans seem biologically prepared to acquire fears of certain animals and situations that were important survival threats in evolutionary history (Seligman, 1971, McNally, 1987). People also seem predisposed to develop phobias toward creatures that arouse disgust, like slugs, maggots, rats, or cockroaches (Webb & Davey, 1993).

Neuroscientists are finding that biological factors, such as greater blood flow and metabolism in the right side of the brain than in the left hemisphere, may also be involved in phobias. Identical twins reared apart sometimes develop the same phobias; one pair independently becoming claustrophobic, for example (Eckert, Heston, & Bouchard, 1981).

There may be other reasons why some phobias are more common than others. One is that we have many safe experiences with cars and tools to outweigh any bad experiences. We have few safe experiences with snakes or spiders or with falling from high places (Kleinknecht, 1982). Cross-cultural psychologists point out that phobias are influenced by cultural factors. Agoraphobia, for example, is much more common in the United States and Europe than in other areas of the world (Kleinman, 1988). A social phobia common in Japan but almost nonexistent in the West is taijin kyofusho, an incapacitating fear of offending or harming others through one's own awkward social behavior or imagined physical defect (Kirmayer, 1991). The focus of cognition for a sufferer of this phobia is on the harm to others, not on embarrassment to the self as in social phobias in the West. Taijin kyofusho is described by Japanese psychiatrists as a pathological exaggeration of the modesty and sensitive regard for others that, at lower levels, is considered proper in Japan (Gray, 1994).

Most psychologists believe that people with panic disorder develop their social phobia or agoraphobia because they are afraid of being incapacitated or embarrassed by a panic attack in a public place. In a sense, they are afraid of their own fear (McNally, 1990).


Reference
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Gray, P. (1994) Psychology, 2nd ed. New York: Worth.

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Perhaps the most famous fear quote of all time:
"The only thing we have to fear is fear it'self - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
---- FDR - First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
"One of the things which danger does to you after a time is -, well, to kill emotion. I don't think I shall ever feel anything again except fear. None of us can hate anymore - or love."
---- Graham Greene - The Confidential Agent (1939)

"What are fears but voices airy?
Whispering harm where harm is not.
And deluding the unwary
Till the fatal bolt is shot!"
---- Wordsworth

"Fear - jealousy - money - revenge - and protecting someone you love."
---- Frederick Knott - Max Halliday, listing the five important motives for murder, Dial M for Murder (1952)

"What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!"
---- Will - Sonnets

"Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake."
---- Edgar Wallace - The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1916)

"- Tush! Tush! Fear little boys with bugs."
---- Will - The Taming of the Shrew

"All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears--of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, or speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required."
---- Dave Barry

"Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not?"
---- Luciano Pavarotti

"Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is."
---- German Proverb

"Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark."
---- Francis Bacon

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."
--- H.P. Lovecraft

"In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly."
---- Coleridge

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

"A man who has been in danger,
When he comes out of it forgets his fears,
And sometimes he forgets his promises."
---- Euripides - Iphigenia in Tauris (414-12 BC)

"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the touch
To win or lose it all"
---- James Graham - Marquis of Montrose

"I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't. I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me."
---- Will - Macbeth

"Being frightened is an experience you can't buy."
---- Anthony Price - Sion Crossing (1984)

"What we fear comes to pass more speedily than what we hope."
---- Publilius Syrus - Moral Sayings (1st C B.C.)

"Solitude scares me. It makes me think about love, death, and war. I need distraction from anxious, black thoughts."
---- Brigitte Bardot

"Why are we scared to die? Do any of us remember being scared when we were born?"
---- Trevor Kay

"A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice."
---- Edgar Watson Howe - Country Town Sayings (1911)

Courage is not the lack of fear but the ability to face it."
---- Lt. John B. Putnam Jr. (1921-1944)

Foa, E. B, & Kozak, M.J. (1986). Emotional processing of fear; Exposure to corrective information. Psychological Bulletin, 99, 20-35.

Bernstein, D. A., Clarke-Stewart, A., Roy, E. J., & Wickens, C. D. (1997). Psychology, 4th ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Marks, I. M. (1987). Fears, phobias, and rituals: Panic, anxiety, and their disorders. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ost, L. G. (1989). One-session treatment for specific phobias. Behavioral Research and Therapy, 27, 1-7. In Gray, P. (1994). Psychology, 2nd. ed. New York: Worth.

Rothbaum, B. O., Hodges, L.F., Kooper, R., Opdyke, D., Williford, J.S., & North, M. (1995). Effectiveness of computer-generated (virtual reality) graded exposure in the treatment of acrophobia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152, 626-628.

Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviorism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wolpe, J. (1958). Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Zinbarg, R. E., Barlow, D. H., Brown, T. A., & Hertz, R. M. (1992). Cognitive-behavioral approaches to the nature and treatment of anxiety disorders. Annual Review of Psychology, 43, 235-267. In Gray, P. (1994). Psychology, 2nd ed. New York: Worth.