The etiology of specific fears and phobias in children: a critique of the non-associative account

Abstract

The non-associative account of phobic etiology assumes that a number of specific fears (e.g., fear of heights, water, spiders, strangers, and separation) have an evolutionary background and may occur in the absence of learning experiences (e.g., conditioning). By this view, these specific fears pertain to stimuli that once posed a challenge to the survival of our prehistoric ancestors. Accordingly, they would emerge spontaneously during the course of normal development and only in a minority of individuals, these specific fears would persist into adulthood. While the non-associative approach has generated interesting findings, several critical points can be raised. First, it capitalizes on negative findings, i.e., the failure to document learning experiences (e.g., conditioning, modeling) in the history of phobic children. Second, it largely ignores factors that have been found to be crucial for the acquisition of early childhood fears (e.g., the developmental level of the child, stimulus characteristics such as novelty, aversiveness, and unpredictability, and early experience with uncontrollable events). As an alternative to the non-associative account, we briefly describe a multifactorial model of childhood fears and phobias. 

Fear Generalization in Humans: Systematic Review and Implications for Anxiety Disorder Research

“…Relying on obvious and salient features of fear stimuli, as reported by a client therefore, might not always be sufficient and a more in-depth and complex analysis might be necessary. In effect, the phenomenon of nonperceptual fear generalization helps make clear why conditioning experiences are not always easily traceable in the clinical context (Muris, Merckelbach, de Jong, & Ollendick, 2002;Poulton & Menzies, 2002).…”

Fear and Phobia: A Critical Review and the Rational-Choice Theory of Neurosis

“…181-182), one would expect, from the perspective of conditioning theory, that children, who have had less extensive fearless experiences with harmless stimuli than adults (e.g., public places), would be more vulnerable to develop clinical phobias. Another puzzling issue concerns the high prevalence of fear and phobia among mentally retarded children (Gullone, 1996;Gullone, Cummins, & King, 1996;Muris, Merckelbach, De Jongh, & Ollendick, 2002;Ramirez & Kratochwill, 1997) and less educated people (Arnarson, Gudmondsdottir, & Boyle, 1998).…”

Fear of Heights and Visual Height Intolerance in Children 8–10 Years Old

“…As in other psychiatric disorders the antagonism nature vs. environment led to a multifactorial model for the manifestation of specific phobias [29]. Cognitive aspects and biases, which consider specific phobias as learned and habituated reactions, are integrated into the non-associative learning theory, i.e., evolution-primed responses to threatening stimuli in predisposed individuals [13,[30][31][32][33][34].…”