How do phobias manifest? Like I understand if you’ve had a traumatic experience with something, you might develop a phobia of it, but is there another way? I’ve heard that phobias can be passed down generations, how is that possible if it’s a mindset?
In: Biology
Fear can be taught. Imagine being told your whole childhood that “any black man you see is going to rape and rob you”. You’ll develop a fear of black men without ever knowing exactly why.
There was an experiment in the 1960s with monkeys and during the experiment, an object was placed in the chamber with the monkeys. Whenever the monkeys would touch or interact with the object, they’d get sprayed with strong, uncomfortable air blast. Some new monkeys were introduced into the chamber and when they went to interact with the object, the original monkeys pulled the newbies away and got very threatening toward them. They were being taught to fear the object.
Possibly it gets thaught to kids because the parents are for example terrified of being underwater, that fear kinda manifests in the raising of the kid so it doesn’t know any better. Some phobias can be completely irrational tho
There is two types of answer for this question.
1 : Like others said, fear can be taught. If your mom is arachnophobic and manifest her fear to spiders when you’re young enough, you can somewhat develop arachnophobia too.
2 : It was recently found that trauma can be (potentially) genetically passed down generations. I red a few papers about it for PTSD and it was found that some DNA modifications that occured during PTSD can be transmitted to the next generation.
And it manifest in terms of behavior too.
They provoked a PTSD on rats with electric shocks, and those rats had offsprings. The offsprings manifested increased stress-coping mechanisms compared to normal rats. Basically the rats whose dad got traumatized were more “brave” than normal rats.
We don’t really know how it works thought.
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