ARACHNOPHOBIA

Arachnophobia

Arachnophobia

Thesis Statement

Though most arachnids are harmless, a person with arachnophobia may still panic or feel uneasy around one.

Analysis

An evolutionary reason for the phobias, such as arachnophobia, claustrophobia, fear of snakes or mice, etc. remains unresolved. One view, especially held in evolutionary psychology, is that the presence of venomous spiders led to the evolution of a fear of spiders or made acquisition of a fear of spiders especially easy. Like all traits, there is variability in the intensity of fears of spiders, and those with more intense fears are classified as phobic. Spiders, for instance, being relatively small, don't fit the usual criterion for a threat in the animal kingdom where size is a factor, but nearly all species are venomous, and although rarely dangerous to humans, some species are dangerous. Arachnophobes will spare no effort to make sure that their whereabouts are spider-free, hence they would have had a reduced risk of being bitten in ancestral environments. Therefore, arachnophobes may possess a slight advantage over non-arachnophobes in terms of survival. However, this theory is undermined by the disproportional fear of spiders in comparison to other, far more deadly creatures that were present during Homo sapiens' environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. Studies have shown that a fear of spiders can develop before birth.

The alternative view is that the dangers, such as from spiders, are overrated and not sufficient to influence evolution. Instead, inheriting phobias would have restrictive and debilitating effects upon survival, rather than being an aid. For some communities such as in Papua New Guinea and South America (except Chile, Brazil and Argentina), spiders are included in traditional foods. This suggests arachnophobia may be a cultural, rather than genetic trait.

The treatment that I feel would be extremely effective for the treatment of specific phobias would be behavioral therapy. When something triggers the fear response in your brain your first inclination is to turn that response off. Scientists and psychologists feel that there is a better way to deal with the fear. Behavioral therapy is the idea of conditioning the brain to not view the object of your fear as something to be afraid of. "When the brain sets anxiety alarms ringing, our first inclination is to find the off switch. Behavioral scientists take the opposite approach. They want you to get accustomed to the noise so that you don't hear it anymore." (Gorman, pg. 52) In other words they want to make the fear causing stimulus a normal thing to the victim. This is accomplished by first exposing the patient to a very small portion of that which they are afraid of and then gradually build upon that portion until the individual is conditioned to respond to the stimulus without fear. For example someone suffering form arachnophobia might be shown a picture of a spider. Patients may have had an unfortunate incident as a child, i.e. they were bitten by a spider. 2) They may have seen someone close to them being bitten by a ...