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PHOBIA LIBRARY

Read up on fear, panic and phobia to get a general overview of phobias and trauma and fear management. Learn mindfulness based self care principles and exercises for managing phobias from my books on trauma and self care.

​JUMP TO A CHAPTER
​Fear | Function | Thought | Treatment | Coping
For Help See: Fear in the Brain | Fear Dictionary
THE LIBRARY TOPIC HOME PAGES
​​Introduction to Trauma, Fear and Phobia
Part 1: ​Defining Fear and the Fear Response
Part 2: Emotional & Cognitive Functions of Fear
Part 3: Maladaptive Thought Processing
​Part 4: Professional Therapy & Mindful Self Care
​THE PHOBIA COLLECTION DOWNLOADS
​Browse Collection of Phobias by Topic
Download Collection of Phobias
Download Dictionary of Fear and Phobia
Download Self Care Guides for Coping

PART ONE - FEAR
​​DEFINING FEAR AND THE FEAR RESPONSE
​ Articles defining fear, brain structure, fear conditioning, the fear response (fight, flight or freeze), & characteristics of panic & anxiety attacks

DIRECTORY OF FEAR
Characteristics of the Primal Emotion of Fear
Phobia Calls on the Fear Conditioning Process
Identifying the Brain Structures of Fear
​Chemical Reactions in the Brain
Fear Triggers the Fight or Flight Response
Can’t Fight or Flight - Then Stop and Freeze
Fear Symptoms That Aggravate Anxiety
What Happens During a Panic Attack
​Fear Manipulation of People and the Collective​
ALL CONTENT PROVIDED BY MY BOOKS ON MINDFUL SELF CARE FOR TRAUMA AND FEAR
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Download the Glossary of Fear

For help with the terms in this series
Download the Panic and Fear Dictionary of the Brain

FEAR MANIPULATION
In People and the Collective


​FEAR TECHNIQUES TO ACHIEVE A CERTAIN OUTCOME
Fear can alter how a person thinks or reacts to situations because fear has the power to inhibit one's rational way of thinking. As a result, people who do not experience fear, are able to use fear as a tool to manipulate others.

People who are experiencing fear seek preservation through safety and can be manipulated by a person selling that safety. A manipulator can talk people out of the truth even when they see right in front of themselves. Words become more real than reality so a manipulator can convince people to reject the truth and instead choose to believe and trust in their truth.

See Also: Cognitive Dissonance & Cognitive Bias

Politicians are notorious for using fear to manipulate the people into supporting their will through keywords and key phrases such as "it is for your safety," or "it is for the safety of this country."

BROWSE COLLECTION OF PHOBIAS BY TOPIC
​
FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN
Fear of the unknown or irrational fear is caused by negative thinking (worry) or overthinking (ruminating) which arises from anxiety accompanied by a subjective sense of apprehension or dread. Irrational fear shares a common neural pathway with other fears, a pathway that engages the nervous system to mobilize bodily resources in the face of danger or threat. Many people are scared of the "unknown". Chronic irrational fear has negative effects since the stimulus is commonly absent or perceived from delusions. Being scared may cause people to experience anticipatory fear of what may lie ahead rather than planning and evaluating for the same.
  • FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN makes people susceptible to manipulation.

PHOBIAS OF SUBJECTIVE & ABSTRACT CONCEPTS

FEAR OF DEATH
Death anxiety is multidimensional; it involves the "fear your own death, the death of others, fear of the unknown after death, fear of obliteration, and fear of the dying process, which includes fear of a slow death and a painful death. Death anxiety is one's uncertainty to dying. Thanatophobia, which is anxiety over death that becomes debilitating or keeps a person from living their life.

Psychologists have had theories that fear of death motivates religious commitment, and that assurances about an afterlife alleviate the fear. Empirical research on this topic has been equivocal. Religiosity related to fear of death that involves the afterlife is portrayed as a time of punishment. Intrinsic religiosity as opposed to mere "formal religious involvement", has been found to be negatively correlated with death anxiety.

PHOBIAS OF GOD & RELIGION AND DEATH & DYING

MANIPULATING THE FEAR OF FAILURE
Fear of failure has been studied frequently in the field of sport psychology. Many scholars have tried to determine how often fear of failure is triggered within athletes, as well as what personalities of athletes most often choose to use this type of motivation. Studies have also been conducted to determine the success rate of this method of motivation.

PHOBIAS OF CONDITIONS OR CHARACTERISTICS

In sports, fear is often used as a means of motivation against failure that increases the chances of a positive outcome. The fear created is initially a cognitive state to the receiver and generates the first response of the athlete. This response generates a possibility of a fight or flight reaction by the athlete (receiver), which in turn will increase or decrease the possibility of success or failure.
  • The amount of time that the athlete has to determine this decision is small but it is still enough time for the receiver to make a determination through cognition.
  • Even though the decision is made quickly, the decision is determined through past events that have been experienced by the athlete.
  • The results of these past events will determine how the athlete will make his cognitive decision in the split second that he or she has.

In the context of sports, a model was created by R.S. Lazarus in 1991 that uses the cognitive
motivational relational theory of emotion. It suggests that fear of failure results when beliefs about the negative consequences of failing are activated by situations in which failure is possible. These belief systems predispose the individual to make appraisals of threat while experiencing the state anxiety associated with the fear situations.

FEAR OF ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES
Another study was done in 2001 created five adverse consequences of failing that were repeated over time. The five categories include:
  • Experiencing shame and embarrassment
  • Devaluing one's self-estimate
  • Having an uncertain future
  • Important people losing interest
  • Upsetting the important people
These five categories can help one infer the possibility of an individual to associate failure with one of these threat categories, which will lead them to experiencing fear of failure.

These studies have created a more precise definition of fear of failure: "a dispositional tendency to experience apprehension and anxiety in evaluative situations because individuals have learned that failure is associated with aversive consequences".

PHOBIAS OF CONDITIONS OR CHARACTERISTICS

FEAR OF SOCIAL SITUATIONS
Social anxiety is nervousness in social situations. Some disorders associated with the social anxiety spectrum include anxiety disorders, mood disorders, autistic spectrum disorders, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. Individuals higher in social anxiety avert their gazes, show fewer facial expressions, and show difficulty with initiating and maintaining a conversation.

  • Adolescents have identified their most common anxieties as focused on relationships with peers to whom they are attracted, peer rejection, public speaking, blushing.
  • Adult most common anxieties include performance anxiety, public speaking anxiety, stage fright, and timidness. All of these may also assume clinical forms, and become anxiety disorders

FEAR OF REJECTION
Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction. The topic includes interpersonal rejection (or peer rejection), romantic rejection and familial estrangement. A person can be rejected by individuals or an entire group of people. Furthermore, rejection can be either active, by bullying, teasing, or ridiculing, or passive, by ignoring a person, or giving the "silent treatment". The experience of being rejected is subjective for the recipient, and it can be perceived when it is not actually present. The word ostracism is often used for the process (in Ancient Greece ostracism meant voting into temporary exile). The experience of rejection can lead to a number of adverse psychological consequences such as loneliness, low self-esteem, aggression, and depression. It can also lead to feelings of insecurity and a heightened sensitivity to future rejection.
See Also: Emotions and Subjective Feelings

PHOBIAS OF LOVE AND MATTERS OF THE HEART

The pain of romantic rejection occurs when a person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores/avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilaterally ends an existing relationship. The state of unrequited love is a common experience in youth. Romantic rejection is a painful, emotional experience that appears to trigger a response in the caudate nucleus of the brain, and associated dopamine and cortisol activity. Subjectively, rejected individuals experience a range of negative emotions, including frustration, intense anger, jealousy, hate, and eventually, resignation, despair, and possible long-term depression.

BROWSE COLLECTION OF PHOBIAS BY TOPIC

COLLECTIVE FEARS
Collective fear is likely to produce an authoritarian mentality, desire for a strong leader, strict discipline, punitiveness, intolerance, xenophobia, and less democracy, according to regality theory. Historically, this effect has been exploited by political entrepreneurs in many countries for purposes such as increasing support for an authoritarian government, avoiding democratization, or preparing the population for war.

HATE, INTOLERANCE & DISCRIMINATION PHOBIAS

FEAR OF DISASTER
Fear may be politically and culturally manipulated to persuade citizens of ideas which would otherwise be widely rejected or dissuade them from ideas which would otherwise be widely supported.
  • In contexts of natural disasters, states manage the fear to provide their citizens with an explanation about the event, to blame some minorities or to adjust their previous beliefs.

PHOBIAS OF CATASTROPHIC EVENTS & DISASTER

CULTURE OF FEAR
Culture of fear (or climate of fear) is the concept that to incite fear in the general public to achieve political or workplace goals is by employing emotional bias. Perceptions of risk, ideas about safety and controversies over health, the environment and technology have little to do with science or empirical evidence. Rather, they are shaped by cultural assumptions about human vulnerability.

  • To Support War: Nazi leader Hermann Göring explains how people can be made fearful and to support a war they otherwise would oppose: All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
  • The Culture of Fear: The use of economic exploitation, physical repression, political control, and strict censorship was used to establish a "culture of fear" in Brazil. The three psychological components of the culture of fear included silence through censorship, sense of isolation, and a generalized belief that all channels of opposition were closed. A feeling of complete hopelessness prevailed, in addition to withdrawal from opposition activity.

FEAR OF VICTIMIZATION
Victimization is the process of being victimized or becoming a victim. The field that studies the process, rates, incidence, effects, and prevalence of victimisation is called victimology.
  • Peer victimization is the experience among children of being a target of the aggressive behavior of other children, who are not siblings and not necessarily age-mates.
  • Secondary victimization (also known as post crime victimization or double victimization ) refers to further victim-blaming from criminal justice authorities following a report of an original victimization.
  • Self-victimization (or victim playing) is the fabrication of victimhood for a variety of reasons such to justify abuse of others, or to manipulate others. It is a maladaptive coping strategy or attention seeking.

PHOBIAS OF CONDITIONS OR CHARACTERISTICS

FEARMONGERING
Fearmongering is a form of manipulation which causes fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger
Fearmongering can have strong psychological effects, which may be intended or unintended.
  • The mean world syndrome, where people perceive the world as more dangerous than it is.
  • Making people fear the wrong things and use an excessive amount of resources to avoid the rare and unlikely dangers while more probable dangers are ignored. For example, some parents have kept their children at home to prevent abduction while they paid less attention to more common dangers such as lifestyle diseases or traffic accidents.
  • Rally around the flag effect, increasing support for the incumbent political leaders. For example, official warnings about the risk of terrorist attacks have led to increased support for the president of the USA.
  • Used in psychological warfare for the purpose of influencing a target population. The tactics often involve defamation of an enemy by means of smear campaigns. Terrorism is also a kind of psychological warfare. It is creating violence and terror in order to get media attention or to scare an enemy
  • The strategy of tension which is based on featuring violence and chaos in order to create political instability, defame opponents, to pave the way for a more authoritarian government, or to prevent liberation.

PHOBIAS OF CONTROL BY POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

FEAR OF TERRORISM
Since the 1960s, scientists have studied the relationship between media consumption and the fear of crime. Mass media creates a worldview reflective of “recurrent media messages”, rather than one that is based on reality. Many Americans are exposed to some form of media on a daily basis. Television and social media platforms are the most used methods for local and international news that center around violent crime and acts of terror.
  • Smartphones and social media mean it is easy are bombard people with constant news updates, global terrorism, and stories that come from all corners of the globe.
  • Media fuels fear of terrorism and other threats to national security, all of which have negative psychological effects on the population, such as depression, anxiety, and insomnia.
  • Politicians conduct interviews, televised or otherwise, and utilize their social media platforms immediately after violent crimes and terrorist acts, to further cement the fear of terrorism into the minds of their constituents.

The term War on Terror was intended to generate a culture of fear deliberately because it obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue".

PHOBIAS ON MILITARY DEFENSE AND WAR

WORKPLACE CLIMATE OF FEAR
Fear in the workplace can present itself in the form of doubt. Doubtful of your employer’s credibility, doubt in your own performance or doubt of the corporate ethics.
Individual differences in sensitivity to reward, punishment and motivation have been studied under the premises of reinforcement sensitivity theory and have also been applied to workplace performance. A culture of fear at the workplace runs contrary to the "key principles" established for managers to transform business effectiveness. One of the fourteen principles is to drive out fear in order to allow everyone to work effectively for the company.

Fear of Authority: The destructive sides of leadership are identified in petty tyrants or leaders who exercise a tyrannical style of management. This style creates in a climate of fear in the workplace. An authoritarian style of leadership may create a climate of fear, with little or no room for dialogue and with complaining being considered futile.

Fear of Doubt: Partial or intermittent negative reinforcement can create an effective climate of fear and doubt. When employees get the sense that bullies are tolerated, a climate of fear may be the result. Several studies have confirmed a relationship between bullying, on one hand, and an autocratic leadership and an authoritarian way of settling conflicts or dealing with disagreements, on the other.

​PHOBIAS OF CONDITIONS OR CHARACTERISTICS

Fear of Tolerance: In a study of public-sector union members, approximately one in five workers reported having considered leaving the workplace as a result of witnessing bullying taking place. The presence of a climate of fear in which employees considered reporting to be unsafe and bullies being tolerated despite management knowing of the presence of bullying.

HATE, INTOLERANCE & DISCRIMINATION PHOBIAS

THE USE OF FEAR APPEALS
Fear appeals are often used in marketing and social policy as a method of persuasion. Fear is an effective tool to change attitudes which are moderated by motivation and ability to process the fear message. Examples of fear appeal include the fears of social exclusion, getting laid-off from one's job, getting cancer from smoking or involvement in car accidents and driving.

Fear appeals are nonmonotonic, meaning that the level of persuasion does not always increase when the claimed danger is increased. A study of public service messages on AIDS found that if the messages were too aggressive or fearful, they were rejected by the subject; a moderate amount of fear is the most effective attitude changer.
  • Some argue that it is not the level of fear that is decisive changing attitudes via persuasion. Rather, it is belief that it can work as long as a scare-tactics message includes a recommendation to cope with the fear.

APPEAL TO PERSUASION
An appeal to fear (also called argumentum ad metum or argumentum in terrorem) is a fallacy in which a person attempts to create support for an idea by attempting to increase fear towards an alternative. The appeal to fear is common in marketing and politics

APPEAL TO EMOTION
The following fallacy has the following argument form:
  • Either P or Q is true.
  • Q is frightening.
  • Therefore, P is true.
The argument is invalid. The appeal to emotion is used in exploiting existing fears to create support for the proposal, namely P. Also, often the false dilemma fallacy is involved, suggesting Q is the proposed idea's sole alternative.

PHOBIAS OF EMOTIONS & SUBJECTIVE FEELINGS

APPEAL OF UNCERTAINTY
Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) is the appeal to fear in sales or marketing. It describes how a company disseminates negative (and vague) information on a competitor's product. FUD is "implicit coercion" by "any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon." FUD creates a situation in which buyers are encouraged to purchase by brand, regardless of the relative technical merits. Opponents state that the spreading of fear, uncertainty, and doubt is an unethical marketing technique that these corporations consciously employ.

APPEALS OF DISHONESTY
SHOCKVERTISING
Advertisers discovered that "fear sells". Ad campaigns based on fear, sometimes referred to as shockvertising, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Fear is a strong emotion and it can be manipulated to persuade people into making emotional rather than reasoned choices.
  • Car commercials that imply that having fewer airbags will cause the audience's family harm
  • Disinfectant commercials that show pathogenic bacteria lurking on every surface, fear-based advertising works.

While using fear in ads has generated some negative reactions by the public, there is evidence to show that "shockvertising" is a highly effective persuasion technique, and over the last several years, advertisers have continued to increase their usage of fear in ads in what has been called a "never-ending arms race in the advertising business

APPEAL TO FORCE
Argumentum ad baculum (Latin for "argument to the cudgel" or "appeal to the stick") is the fallacy committed when one makes an appeal to force or threat of force to bring about the acceptance of a conclusion. Someone participates in argumentum ad baculum when they point out the negative consequences of holding the contrary position (ex. believe what I say, or I will hit you). It is a specific case of the negative form of an argument to the consequences.
MORE ON FEAR
Characteristics of the Primal Emotion of Fear
Phobia Calls on the Fear Conditioning Process
Identifying the Brain Structures of Fear
​Chemical Reactions in the Brain
Fear Triggers the Fight or Flight Response
Can’t Fight or Flight - Then Stop and Freeze
Fear Symptoms That Aggravate Anxiety
What Happens During a Panic Attack
​Fear Manipulation of People and the Collective​
This content is provided for informational purposes only. Author is not a medical professional. Talk to your doctor to determine what therapy is right for you.
Self care techniques are meant to supplement professional treatment not replace it.
DISCLAIMER OF THE LEARNING LIBRARY

BROWSE PHOBIA COLLECTION​
​Phobia collection is presented in eight themed parts
​VIEW LIST INDEX or ​JUMP TO A PART
PART [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ]

PHOBIA COLLECTION BY TOPIC​
common ~ abstract ~ ordinary ~ bizarre ~ catastrophic ~ psyche ~ icky - academic ~ knowledge ~ education ~ literary ~ art ~ music ~ religion ~ political ~ law ~ order military ~ war ~ discrimination ~ science ~ chemical ~ energy ~ time ~ numbers ~ technology ~ nature ~ environment ~ astronomy ~ weather ~ geography ~ people ~ family ~ community ~ anatomy ~ medical ~ disease ~ emotions ~ senses ~ sensations ~ movement ~ conditions~ love ~ relationships ~ sexuality ~ lifestyle ~ places ~ events ~ objects ~ clothing ~ tools ~ vehicles ~ home ~ cooking ~ food ~ entertainment ~ sports ~ recreation ~ toys ~ games ~ monsters ~ characters ~ spooky ~ nightmares ~ delusional ~ joke ~ fiction

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​OTHER PHOBIA AND FEAR DOWNLOADS:
​Dictionary of Trauma, Phobia and Fear
Self Care Guides for Fear & Phobias​
Phobia articles provided by my self care series Healing the PTSD Mind ​ and my series on mindfulness based self care Be Mindful Be Well​. These self directed guides are written from a trauma perspective but the content applies to the symptoms of phobia like fear and panic. ​Learn and simple self care techniques with mindfulness.
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