Question

Discuss the theory of evolutionary preparedness and how it may apply to specific phobia, social phobia...

Discuss the theory of evolutionary preparedness and how it may apply to specific phobia, social phobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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Answer #1
  • Suffering from a phobia can be a debilitating and distressing condition. Phobias induce physiological responses and can impact upon daily routines, inhibiting life experiences and opportunities. While more people are likely to have unpleasant experiences with non-biological stimuli there is research to suggest that phobias have a biological specificity i.e. most phobias are based upon a fear of biological stimuli.
  • According to preparedness theory, phobias are based in the evolutionary programming of humans and they are primed to respond to fear specific stimuli which threaten survival e.g. spiders and snakes.
  • Our evolutionary history has affected the stimuli we are most likely to fear.People and primates seem genetically prepared to quickly associate certain objects with fear rather than other objects.
  • While there are many types of specific phobias, most involve animals and situations that were a threat to our ancestors. Those primates and humans who had this rapid acquisition of fear were more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
  • The fear itself is not inherited, the tendency to make certain connections quickly is. It was also advantageous to acquire fears of social stimuli that signaled danger - angry or contemptuous faces.
  • So social phobias may have an evolutionary basis. The most common obsession in OCD - contamination and dirt - was also a threat to our ancestors and may have the same type of preparedness component.
  • Seligman (1971) said that we have evolved to be conditioned to fear some things more than others. Seligman thought that less input was needed to learn an association to a prepared stimulus than to a non prepared one.
  • If evolution prepares us to learn to be afraid of fire, we will make an association between fear and fire much more quickly than between fear and a non prepared stimulus such as a rock.
  • These things included situations which can be dangerous/threatening to humans early in their evolution, such as fire, deep water, lightning, and heights. These are all common phobias.
  • In conclusion, the biological theory of phobias suggests that we have genes of fear for these objects that were passed down to us from our ancestors, causing us to be more 'prepared' to fear objects that were harmful to early humans, making us more likely to fear these objects over objects that were not harmful to them in the past.
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