This study attempts to explore the basis of people's fear of animals.

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ABSTRACT

This study attempts to explore the basis of people’s fear of animals.  Specifically, it seeks to explore the views of 126 individuals, with a majority of Maltese and a minority of foreigners.

This study adopts a quantitative methodology.  Data is gathered using questionnaire surveys assigned to each individual.  Analysis of data uses spearman’s Rho correlation and a first-order partial correlation derived from Guilford and Fruchter.

Data derived shows a strong positive correlation between perceived fear and perceived strangeness.

To conclude, the results may be bringing out the fact that the appearance of the different animals is the strongest factor relating to the fear of them.


INTRODUCTION

Our study regarding the fear of small animals is a replica of the original study conducted by Bennett-Levy and Marteau; who showed that a correlation existed between people’s fear of some small animals and the animal’s physical form. Their findings indicate that the more they differ from the human figure, the more fear they are likely to evoke. This leads to the idea that there may be a cognitive element involved; this could be learnt, or as Seligman proposed, humans may be biologically predisposed to fear certain animals.

 

Throughout our study we hope to find whether this fear of certain animals is a result of genetics or learning (such as classical conditioning).


LITERATURE REVIEW

Fear

Fear comes from the old English word “Faer”, meaning sudden danger; where the danger is concrete, real and knowledgeable, so the fright is justified.  It may be seen from three angles, namely panic, anxiety, and phobias.

Animal phobias are simple phobias, some of which include:

  • Arachnophobia – fear of spiders,
  • Cynophobia – fear of dogs, and
  • Ophidophobia – fear of snakes.

They almost always begin in childhood.  If the phobia starts later in life it will be more ominous.  It seems that animal phobias are related to specific events in life, like a child bitten by a ferocious dog develops a fear form all dogs.  Another fact about animal phobias is that boys and girls are equally likely to have animal phobias until puberty, but women tend to keep them into adulthood.

Learning

Learning, as defined by the Cambridge dictionary is: “the activity of obtaining knowledge”. However, different areas of psychology conceptualize and define this term variedly. Behaviourists, for example, consider learning to be: “…a relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience”. Whereas, cognitive theory relies on the mental processes that a person undergoes in order to achieve an altered state.

During a study carried out by Bennett-Levy and Marteau, approximately a 100 participants were selected, and these were then divided into 2 groups.  Their results showed that the most feared animal was the “rat”, which was also considered to be the most harmful. There was also a significant difference on perceived fear as related to gender, with women being notably more fearful of ten animals.

Previous Research and Studies

Bennett-Levy and Marteau perceive their results to be supportive of Seligman’s “biological preparedness”.  It could also be interpreted so as to supporting the Social Learning Theory of Alfred Bandura, which holds that learning occurs within a social context.

Seligman and Gray (1971) proposed that humans are biologically predisposed or ‘prepared’ to fear certain animals and to learn certain phobias.  Seligman thought that survival threats in evolutionary origins might be the reason for this.  Webb & Davey (1993) added the fact that people seem to be more prepared to fear animals that rouse disgust and repulsion, like rats, slugs, and maggots.

It has been suggested that, people having animal phobias, always fear the perceptual characteristics of the animal.  Although the animal may be small and harmless, they are still petrified of the thought, sight, and touch of the creature.

Bennett-Levy and Marteau conducted a study to investigate this. They concluded that the amount of fear induced in a person depends upon the objective harmfulness, the animals’ appearance and how different it is to the human form. This study has been replicated and others have come up with the same results.

A Cognitive Approach

Research on people’s fear of animals has also been tackled from a Cognitive Approach.  This approach indicates that we learn to fear animals on the concepts of classical conditioning and operant conditioning, rather than a simple stimulus-response strengthening.

Classical conditioning (CC) focuses on the learning of involuntary emotional or physiological responses, in our case that of fear. Researchers have found it to be a useful model for explaining some of the fears and phobias that people develop.

For example, people’s fear of snakes can be explained by the fact that snakes (CS) were previously associated with a painful bite (UCS), such that individuals become increasingly fearful (CR) of snakes, and possibly everything that reminds the individual of snakes (stimulus generalisation). This may be applied to any other fear/phobia of animals that people might develop.

Research has also shown that phobias can be acquired through operant conditioning (OC).  For example if a person has a mild fear of dogs, and his/her friend decides that whenever he/she visits, he/she will put her dog to the side, the person’s fear of dogs is being reinforced, and may develop into a phobia. The anxiety is thus being reduced, by avoiding the object or situation, however the phobia is maintained.

Previous research has also found out that treatment of phobias using both the above-mentioned principles is possible. Gross related to this very much.  For example, by the principle of CC, psychologists have found that it’s possible to rid a person from an animal phobia using extinction.  Extinction may also be applied to OC. In this case, fear of animals may be stopped, by stopping reinforcement of the behaviour.

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Thus, as was seen above, through cognitive development, we can understand how:

  1. Familiar animals are feared less, and
  2. If a feared animal is experienced repeatedly, that fear will gradually fade away.

Therefore we are able to understand the decline and peak of phobias at particular ages. (Agras et al, 1969).

Treatment of Phobias:

There are a number of other approaches to the treatment of phobias.  Here we briefly describe three of them:

  1. The Psychodynamic Perspective

Animal phobias belong to the family of anxiety disorders, referred to as neurosis, by psychodynamic ...

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