Phobia Essay

Many people claim to have a phobia without full understanding of the difference between a phobia and plain fear. A phobia is an irrational fear of an object or experience that not only tends to last a long time, but their sense of endangerment exists regardless of the fact that the person knows their extreme fear reaction is irrational. A phobia is a learned behavior that a person’s genetics seem to play a role in the initial development of. This indicates to, phobia being apart of both nurture and nature but nurture having a greater effect in the activation and further development. The activation of this disorder is usually linked a particular even making this learned behavior, classical conditioning, as it’s initiated by a stimulus, a feeling of endangerment paired with the neutral object, conditioning the person to associate the neutral object with a feeling of endangerment.
You can have a strong fear of an object, but not have it affect your life so much that you have a phobia for it. I am terrified of snakes and used to think I had a phobia. This fear came from a bad experience when I was about seven years old when a group of kids saw a snake and decide to mess with it. Naturally the snake responded by trying to attack the kids. From that day …show more content…
The level that it affects people’s life varies, but a phobia is a clinically recognized disorder because of how it affects the people with the disorder. Most people tend to make up phobias for objects that they are fearful of or cause them discomfort, but when you see and understand the life of a person that has an actual phobia you realize how your fear level and their fear level differs. A part of our biological make up that got a combination of genes and nurturing that takes it from being a survival tool to a harmful one against us. Which seems to be a classically conditioned behavior that thankfully could be unlearned though proper