Phobias and Fear Factors

What is there to be afraid of? Paraskevidekatriaphobia, the fear of Friday the 13th, perhaps? If you were to consult a complete list of phobias, apparently everything. There are nearly as many phobias as there are nouns; just attach a Greek prefix to -phobia and you’re off to the fear factory.

Fear is in our DNA
Psychologists believe that evolution has woven fear into our collective unconscious. This is a good thing, in and of itself, since fear serves the vital function of alerting us to dangerous situations. It’s a defense mechanism. But a phobia is an extreme and disabling fear accompanied by an intense need to avoid the object or situation. As the thinking goes, phobic people may be exaggerating fears programmed into the human mind way back when we lived in caves and clubbed our dinner over the head with a stick.

Evolution is still catching up

The typical evolved brain knows, for instance, that snakes are more afraid of us than we are of them. But the primal brain says, “Shoot that thing.” It helps to see it through the caveman’s eyes. Fear developed to keep him alive.

But now consider the phobic mindset, in which fear becomes irrational. Say a young woman living in the hills of Los Angeles has a phobia about elephants. They are not indigenous to her hemisphere and she doesn’t go to the circus, but she freaks out when one appears on the nature channel. She can’t even read “Babar.” While most contemporary Westerners think of elephants as gentle giants in a zoo, her caveman self is sure the beast would want her for lunch. The primal fear has a lock on her.

Another example is aviophobia, the fear of flying. It’s possible people fear flying not because of the crashes reported (which, statistically, are very rare) but because there is something unnatural—to the caveman—about being shot through the air at 600 miles per hour, 32,000 feet above the ground, eating salty foods.

You are not alone (does that scare you?)
The most common phobias are zoophobias, which are anxieties about animals. Bats, rats, dogs and cats all make the list. The general fear of insects is very common, as is fear of mice. The two animals most likely to give the willies, though, are spiders and snakes. Seven percent of the population has a zoophobia, and women are three times more likely to be afflicted.

The five most common phobias are:
1. Fear of snakes (ophidiophobia)
2. Fear of giving a speech (glossophobia)
3. Fear of heights (acrophobia)
4. Fear of rodents (musophobia)
5. Fear of flying (aviophobia)

Following closely are phobias about confined spaces, thunder, nighttime and dogs.