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.