The Relationship between Appearance and Fear of Animals.

Deena Maher

The Relationship between Appearance and Fear of Animals

Introduction

Prolonged and excessive fears are classified as phobias, which are a type of Anxiety disorder according to the DSM-IV. When the phobia takes over the persons ability to live a ‘normal’ life it is classed as a mental disorder, (psychopathology is the study of mental disorders). There are three types of phobias; specific phobias, social phobias and agoraphobia. Specific phobias are fears relating to something specific such as fear of animals, the most common including snakes, spiders, rodents and heights. The five types of specific phobias include; animal type, situational type (eg: planes, lifts), natural environment (eg: heights, storms, water), blood injection – injury type and ‘other’.

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There are a variety of different explanations and theories of phobic anxiety disorders. These include genetic explanations, neurological explanations and the behavioral theory. The genetic explanation basically studies whether or not phobias are hereditary via family history studies (relying on interviews), adoption studies and the most common – twin studies that examine the role of concordance of a disorder. Neurological explanations of phobias are based on the function of the automatic nervous system where people who develop phobias have a high level of physiological arousal making them sensitive to their external environment. The behavioral theory revolves around the concept of conditioning. The classical conditioning theory is based around learning from experience and association, for example you may have a panic attack due to being stuck in a lift and therefore associate all lifts with this fear causing you to avoid them in the future and maybe develop a phobia. In terms of operant conditioning the person would find alternative methods such as using the stairs. This follows the theory where the consequence of an action would determine the likelihood that it would occur again. If the outcome of the behavior is positive than it would be more likely to occur again than if it was negative. Positive outcomes are known as reinforcements (there are negative reinforcements where the stimulus is administered or negative reinforcements where an aversive stimulus is removed).A negative outcome is known as a punishment where a positive punishment is when an aversive stimulus is administered and a negative punishment is when a positive stimulus is removed.

Watson and Raynor (1920) researched the theory of phobias and conditioning by causing a 10 month old boy ‘Little Albert’ to form a phobia towards a white rat using classical conditioning techniques. Here they showed that the phobia could also be generalized to other things that relate to it. For example, if someone is bitten by a spider in a park and they develop a phobia of spiders, this phobia may be generalized to the park, all parks and even going outside.

Seligen (1971) proposed the idea of biological ‘prepardness’ suggesting that species are prepared to avoid potentially threatening stimuli. Previous research that applies to the basis of my study includes a study investigating whether perceived harmfulness or appearance is the strongest factor towards fear of an animal – Martyn Long. Bennett – Levy and Manteau (1984) show that people’s fear of animals is highly correlated with the appearance and how much the animal differs from the human form. The research also provides implications for treatment and expanded on the basis of the learning theory. The experiment had a lack of ‘control’ for example, rats were seen as most feared but were perceived as equally ugly and harmful however others may have rats as pets and therefore I do not think this is so relevant. There are also extraneous variables other than the attractiveness of the animal that may affect how fearful someone is, such as how fast it moves, how it feels ie: slimy, past experience and knowledge.