Fear Not!
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Experts,
however, say a true phobic reaction is a whole different category
of terror, a central nervous system wildfire that's impossible
to mistake. In the face of the thing that triggers fear, phobics
experience sweating, racing heart, difficulty breathing and
even a fear of imminent death - all accompanied by an overwhelming
need to flee. In addition, much of the time that they are
away from the feared object or situation is spent dreading
the next encounter and developing elaborate strategies intended
to avoid it. "Jeanette," 44, a teacher's assistant, is so
terrified of cats that she sends her daughter, 21, into an
unfamiliar store to scout around and sound a feline all clear
before she enters. The daughter has been walking point this
way since age five. "Nora," 50, a social worker, will circumnavigate
a block with a series of right turns rather than make a single
left, so afraid is she of facing the stream of traffic that
a left turn requires.
Most psychologists
now assign phobias to one of three broad categories: social
phobias, in which the sufferer feels paralyzing fear at the
prospect of social or professional encounters; panic disorders,
in which the person is periodically blindsided by overwhelming
fear for no apparent reason; and specific phobias - fear of
snakes and enclosed spaces and heights and the like. Of the
three, the specific phobias are the easiest to treat, partly
because they are the easiest to understand.
The human
brain may be a sophisticated thing, but there is an awful
lot of ancient programming still etched into it. For "Martin,"
21, a dental student in London, Ontario, his fear of snakes
is so overwhelming that he stapled together pages in a textbook
to avoid flipping to a photo of a snake. He often wakes with
nightmares that he is sitting in a bar or a stadium and suddenly
sees a snake slithering toward him. "It's odd," he says, "because
I'm not in situations where I would ever see snakes."
His brain,
however - or at least the oldest parts of it - may have been.
One of the things that helped early humans survive was a robust
fear-and-flight response: an innate sense of the places and
things that represent danger and a reflexive impulse to hightail
it when one of them is encountered. When the species became
top predator a few million years later, those early lessons
were not easy to unlearn.
Contemporary
researchers believe it's no coincidence that specific phobias
usually fall into one of four subcategories, all of which
would have had meaning for our ancient ancestors: fear of
insects or animals; fear of natural environments, like heights
and the dark; fear of blood or injury; and fear of dangerous
situations, like being trapped in a tight space. "Phobias
are not random," says Michelle Craske, psychologist at ucla's
Anxiety and Behavioral Disorders Program. "We tend to fear
anything that threatens our survival as a species." When times
change, new fears develop, but the vast majority still fit
into one of the four groups.
It turns
out that we process the fear of these modern menaces in the
same area of the brain our ancient ancestors did - the paralimbic
region, which mediates a whole range of primal responses,
including anger and sexual arousal. "It seems that contemporary
people learned from their ancient ancestors what to be afraid
of and how to handle it," Barlow says.
Not all
of us, however, parlay that ancient history into a modern-day
phobia. It may be our distant ancestors who predispose us
to phobias, but it's our immediate ancestors - specifically
our parents - who seal the deal. As many as 40% of all people
suffering from a specific phobia have at least one phobic
parent, seemingly a clue that phobias could be genetically
influenced. In recent years, a number of scientists have claimed
to have found the phobia gene, but none of those claims have
held up to scrutiny. If phobias are genetically based at all,
they almost certainly require a whole tangle of genes to get
the process going.
But genetics
doesn't even have to be involved as long as learning is. A
childhood trauma - a house fire, say, or a dog bite - may
be more than enough to seize the brain's attention and serve
as a repository for incipient fears. "Temperament also seems
to be critical," says Craske. "Two people can go through the
exact same traumatic event, but the high-strung, emotionally
sensitive person is more vulnerable to the fear." Even secondhand
fears - watching Mom or Dad react with exaggerated terror
to a cockroach or a drop of blood, for example - may play
a role. The journal Nature last week reported a study in which
researchers performed scans on the fear centers of volunteers'
brains and found that when the subjects were merely told to
expect an electric shock, the neurological reaction to the
anticipated jolt was as powerful as fears based on actual
experience. "There is a lot of legitimacy to the idea that
phobias can be learned," says Edna B. Foa, professor of psychology
and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. "We respond
to what we see or experience."
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April 2, 2001 | No.
13
COVER
STORIES
Dread
Heads
Scared? You're not alone-millions of people suffer from debilitating fears.
But science is devising cures for every anxiety, from ablutophobia (fear
of bathing) to zoophobia (fear of animals).
THE
ARTS
CINEMA: In the Mood for Love delights and
mystifies
A gender-bending Thai film takes on the
world
BOOKS:
Calling from Carverland
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY
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