A guide to Acrophobia:the Causes,symptoms,and nature of extreme fears of heights - Essay Example

?Running head: A GUIDE TO ACROPHOBIA A Guide to Acrophobia: The Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Extreme Fears of Heights Affiliation A Guide to Acrophobia: The Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Extreme Fears of Heights A prevalent dream type is that of falling. Psychoanalysts have noted that falling in a dream is common, especially among those who suffer from insecure feelings, unstable moods, and anxieties about the future. A fall dream culminates in an impact, which results in awakening out of the dream. In reality, the act of falling from a tall summit is no different. A fear of falling from such a great height is one of the most common and culturally universal fears among human beings. In the scientific literature, a fear of heights (and of consequently falling) is known as acrophobia. Acrophobia is a condition whose name is derived from the Greek words meaning “edge” and “fear.” As one can tell from this etymology, the fear of heights is not only about the fear of the high point at which one is standing, but also of the edge of that point, which implicates falling as the true source of one’s fear. Given the prevalence of the falling type of dreams, one would expect a human fascination or familiarity with falling from great heights. However, in reality, it is a threat to our individual survival, which is a helpful perspective to take in asking why this fear and this kind of dream are so common among human beings, regardless of their culture, social context, and stage in development. Firstly, acrophobia is defined by an extreme fear of heights, moving past the kind of caution that defines a normal aversion to heights. Also, acrophobia is an irrational sort of fear insofar as it is induced not to an immediately threatening stimulus, but to the thought of an immediately threatening stimulus paired with an actual stimulus. For instance, when an acrophobe sees a sharp edge over a cliff, that individual is likely to imagine falling off of that cliff rather than perceiving that edge without its associations to death and falling. Acrophobia affects somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of people; nearly twice as many women compared to men are acrophobic (Fritscher, 2011). The primary symptom of acrophobia, like with other irrational fears, is a panic attack when faced with the undesired stimulus. When a person who suffers from acrophobia enters a high place, he or she may suffer a panic attack, which is a suddenly and briefly occurring period of intense apprehension. Panic attacks are often debilitating and prevent physical movement. Accordingly, for an acrophobe, a panic attack may prevent that person from getting to a safer location. Being unable to remove oneself from a situation brings about a state of helplessness and makes the situation worse (Fritscher, 2011). Coping strategies to stressful situations include making oneself small, mistrust of one’s own sense of balance, and therefore crawling or kneeling. In addition to anxiety during the event, acrophobia also generates anxiety in individuals with respect to upcoming situations that have the inherent possibility of including height. For instance, a person might avoid visiting a friend’s home if it is in a high-rise apartment complex, and the balcony will be used. The origins of acrophobia is a complex issue. Researchers commonly associate phobias, which are irrational fears, to traumatic experiences. If, for example, a person nearly fell from a 10-story window as a child, the theory is that the person as an adult would suffer from acrophobia. In that case, even though falling from windows is relatively rare, one would be urged to ask whether that is indeed irrational: if an event happened in the past, it is in fact one of many possible events. Another issue that is raised by the traditional explanation of acrophobia in particular is that human beings seemingly have a natural apprehension of heights. The falling dream, as was mentioned previously, is one of the most common dreams for human beings. Similarly, it should not be surprising that the falling fear is likewise one of the most common fears among human beings. The universality of the fear of heights seemingly suggests a biological origin, rather than a purely environmental etiology (Leahy, 2008). Evolutionary psychologists theorize that fearfulness is an adaptive trait that allows individuals to protect themselves from threats to their survival. A fear of heights is, for human beings, a helpful feature of one’s ability to think about and process the world around us. For modern humans’ distant ancestors, those who were not at least cautious about heights and tall edges fell off those edges and, in theory, did not have an opportunity to reproduce. Over time, the genes for cautiousness about threatening edges were passed on to descendants, creating a world today in which a sizeable portion of the population is cautious or even afraid of tall places. This programming of the primitive brain is still important because, intuitively, we know that it is better, from the standpoint of survival, to make a Type I error (false positive) than a Type II error (a false negative). To illustrate this point, imagine a person is running toward what appears to be a cliff, and he stops because he does not want to run off it. A Type I error occurs if he stops and there was no actual cliff, only a mirage. He is safe, but his progress is stopped. A Type II error occurs if the runner keeps running, thinking it is a mirage, and dies from a fall. The second case, which is obviously less desirable, leads human beings to be naturally and innately more cautious about their interactions with the environment. Experiments with infants and adult animal species revealed a wealth of information about the biologic origins of fear (Leahy, 2008). Psychologists placed infants on an opaque table, which was connected to another dark table by a transparent glass platform. The babies refused to crawl across the platform to the other table to its mother. Unable to conceptualize the fact that the glass would prevent them from falling, the infants were fearful of the drop from the table. Even when the mother called out for its infant, inviting it to cross the platform, most children refused. This suggested a natural fear (or caution) of heights. Kittens, like the infants, huddled on one side and refused to cross the platform. On the other hand, ducks and birds in general, had no problem crossing the glass platform, unafraid of the prospect of heights. Because of their ability to fly, it was suggested that ducks lacked the gene that produces an aversion to heights. This seemed to indicate that acrophobia, like other evolutionary adaptive cautions, is genetic. Although the evolutionary explanation is helpful for understanding why we are cautious about edges, it lacks the causal link between this cautiousness and the excess fear that characterizes acrophobia (Fritscher, 2011). A debilitating panic attack during a non-threatening encounter with an edge off a tall building, for instance, is not an adaptive trait. In nature, this trait would lead to the death of the organism. Therefore, there must be some mix of environmental and biological factors in which genes predispose one for a fear of heights, but a traumatic event of some kind makes the fear real (Roth, 2007). This is a superior explanation to the environment-only theory that disregards the role of biology; that is, because a caution of heights or dreams of falling occur even without a traumatic event in one’s past, it seems that biology is an important component of the explanation, but given the limitations of the biology-only theory, it is not comprehensive by any means. Acrophobia, the irrational fear of heights, is a psychological disorder that has a complicated environmental and genetic etiology. There is clearly some natural biologic basis for humans to be cautious of heights and edges, but this biological explanation fails to account for why only some humans suffer panic attacks in response to heights. A more comprehensive explanation would look at the traumatic events in a person’s life and whether those have had an effect on a person’s present symptoms. These considerations also have implications for the treatment of acrophobia. Therapies that attempt to reduce one’s apprehension to heights may need to take into account possibly traumatic events in a patient’s history in order to overcome the phobia permanently. References Fritscher, L. (2011, July 11). Acrophobia. Retrieved September 29, 2011, from About.com: http://phobias.about.com/od/introductiontophobias/a/acrophobiaprof.htm Leahy, R. (2008, May 9). Are we born to be afraid? Retrieved September 29, 2011, from The American Institute for Cognitive Therapy: http://cognitivetherapynyc.com/blog/afraid.pdf Roth, M. (2007, March 7). Why do we think spiders and snakes are so scary? It just might be evolution. Retrieved September 29, 2011, from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07066/767306-32.stm Read More