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
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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