What role does evolution play in the development of phobias?

Seligman's theory (1971) proposed that humans have an evolutionary pre-dispositional preparedness to fear certain stimuli more than others, i.e. spiders and snakes. Our ancestors who had fears of such stimuli were likely to be more successful through natural selection. Seligman went to point out that an organism can be:

Prepared - i.e. people will fear stimuli which signalled danger in ancestral environments but not necessarily our current environment.

Non-prepared - i.e. people don't fear stimuli which do not signal danger in ancestral or our current environment.

Contra-prepared - i.e. people fear stimuli in our current environment but didn't appear a threat to our ancestors.

The idea combines evolutionary ideas about phobias with the conditioning theory. If this idea was correct, we would expect that humans and our evolutionary ancestors would show a fear of these evolutionary relevant stimuli more readily than a fear of evolutionary irrelevant stimuli.

Indeed there is research to support this ideas, with regards to our evolutionary ancestors Mineka et al (1987) exposed naïve laboratory monkeys to a number of fear relevant stimuli (snakes) and fear irrelevant stimuli (flowers) and observed their reactions; the monkeys appeared to display no fear to either stimuli. The researchers then conditioned an experienced demonstrator monkey to behave fearfully in the presence of both the relevant and irrelevant stimuli and then showed the video of the monkey displaying these attributes to the naïve monkeys. Findings showed that after exposure to the demonstrator monkey the naïve monkeys showed a fear response to the relevant stimuli in comparison to the irrelevant stimuli. This supports Seligman's theory because he stated that we are predisposition to fear evolutionary relevant stimuli more greater than evolutionary irrelevant stimuli.

However while support can be gained from Ohman & Mineka's (1979) study for Seligman's theory it is problematic as it uses monkeys, however human studies also showed that fear responses are more readily conditioned to stimuli that was dangerous in ancestral environments, like snakes, than to stimuli which is dangerous only in current environments,

Cook et al (1986) also gained similar findings to those of Ohman & Mineka (1979) but with humans displaying a fear towards slides with images of snakes on rather than the slides with flowers on, when teamed with an electric shock showing a pre-dispositional quality within humankind.

It appears that such fears are easy to explain in evolutionary terms because it seems that many of the most common phobias do relate to the expected adaptive problems faced by our ancestors and there's evidence that these occur across cultures (Buss, 1999). Consider, phobias of cars and guns are extremely rare, yet phobias of spiders and snakes are very prevalent despite the fact cars and guns are stimuli; which are the greatest danger to society, yet spiders and snakes pose the least danger to society in the 21st century.

In conclusion the research evidence would suggest that evolutionary factors do play a role in the development of phobias.