Phobias: Fighting the Fear. Helen Saul

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Observations back him up. In parts of Africa the spider is thought to be wise and local people clean and protect its habitat. Spiders are eaten as a delicacy in areas as diverse as Indo-China, the Caribbean, among the native North Americans and Australian aborigines. Children in Brazil often keep spiders as pets. Hindus in eastern Bengal collect spiders to release at weddings to wish the couple good luck, and in Egypt it is common to put a spider in the bed of a newly married couple.

      Researchers found that the incidence of spider fear in Britain is similar to that in Holland and in the US. So far, so good. Many North Americans are descended from Europeans, so this is not unexpected. The incidence in these countries was higher than in India, as predicted. But, strangely, the incidence in Japan, where there is no particular history of spider fear, is even higher, which tends to weaken the argument.

      Davey’s central point is that it takes countless generations for the biology of a population to change even slightly. Threats would have had to be extremely dangerous and common, killing people in large numbers, for fear reactions to have become biologically programmed. He says we must not ignore the costs of our reactions. Our ancestors might have been well-advised to keep away from poisonous spiders or snakes, but they had to grub through plants to get food. Too much fear of insects would have led to malnutrition if it made people reluctant to look for food. An infant starting to explore its surroundings might be at risk from strangers and suspicion might be appropriate. But strangers are also likely to help a child in trouble and over-reluctance to approach a stranger could be fatal.

      Spiders and snakes may simply have had longer to become embroiled in our culture and inherited learning than modern threats. Guns and electricity outlets have not been around long enough to acquire the symbolic significance that would mark them out as objects to fear. Children may develop fears by absorbing information from the people around them, who are themselves more likely to fear snakes than guns.

      Cultural transmission of fear was a bold challenge to the prevailing view that our thought processes are shaped by strong biological links with our ancient predecessors. It suggested that our fears may have nothing to do with our biology and that perhaps our primitive brain was not, after all, programmed over millions of years. It is possible that we have learned them solely through careful observation of those around us.

      However, this idea has not caught on. Nobody denies the importance of learning, but some of the most exciting research work is attempting to examine the structure and activity in our brains. It seems most likely that genetic and cultural transmission of information work in tandem. We have evolved with a certain biological background which comes to life only in the context of cultural learning. The tendency to fear may be instinctive or hardwired, irrevocably programmed into us as a species. But personal experience and observation of others may be essential before we develop specific fears.

      The idea of flexible learning overlying hardwired fear has been re-explored by evolutionists in recent years. They are delving into aspects of the theory and attempting to test them out in practical, modern ways.

      Animal Instincts

      One of the good things about being an evolutionist is that you can never be definitively contradicted. Most scientists have their best work overturned within their own working life. They spend time trying to disprove other scientists’ ideas but they in turn are usually overtaken by someone else who contradicts or at least refines their work.

      Believing in evolution gives a scientist some respite. Evolution took place over such a phenomenally long time scale that we can never recreate the same conditions and, ultimately, never know anything for certain. It provides a rather luxurious and permanent platform for scientists to stand on.

      This does not mean that we have to accept the evolutionary perspective without question. With some lateral thinking, many ideas stemming from evolution theory can be studied scientifically. For example, evolutionists say that we are more likely to fear ancient rather than modern threats. If this is so, it should hold true for people of different races and cultures since we share the same ancestry and should therefore share the same fear programming.

      A few small studies have produced some evidence for this. Researchers at a mental health clinic in Bangalore, India, found an incidence of phobias only a tenth of that in the West, a rate similar to that in other Indian communities. However, the vast majority of the phobias fitted the evolutionists’ model. Agoraphobia was the most common, closely followed by illness and social phobias. Animal phobias were rare, which is usually the case in clinics catering for people with the most seriously disabling problems. Scottish work found that more than two-thirds of a group’s phobias were relevant to ancient times. A Sri Lankan study used the same method and came up with virtually identical figures. This provides some backing for the idea that people in different parts of the world are similarly attuned to fear threats in the natural world.

      More fundamentally, we cannot apply evolution theory to phobias at all unless we think cautious Stone-Agers were more likely to survive and produce offspring than their fearless friends. Fearfulness should have increased the chances of people passing on their genes to the next generation.

      Coupled with this is the demand that ancient threats which still provoke fear today were capable of killing off people in large numbers, or at least reducing their chances of having children.

      We cannot easily test this out in humans, but we can look for evidence in animals. Darwin noticed that birds are more ready to fear cats than people, presumably because they are at more risk from cats. More than one hundred years after Darwin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman, became interested in how that should be. After all, both cats and people kill birds and it might be as well for the average bird to have a healthy respect for both.

      Seligman said that birds are programmed to fear cats but not people. Somewhere in the depths of the bird’s tiny brain lies the knowledge or the instinct that makes them ready to fear cats. By contrast, they are essentially neutral towards humans. Birds may become afraid of humans, but are not likely to fear people unless they have been harmed or hounded in some way. Cats are natural enemies of birds and have killed off swathes of them down the ages.

      Seligman said that birds are ‘prepared’ to fear cats but ‘unprepared’ to fear people. He said further that some animals are ‘contra-prepared’ to develop certain fears and never become afraid even if they have repeated bad experiences. For example, pigeons instinctively peck for food and in the laboratory they learn quickly to peck a lighted key if it delivers grain. But if the experiment is set up so that pecking the key prevents them getting grain, they do not learn, and continue pecking at the key even though they never get anything to eat. Pigeons normally have to peck to feed and they are contra-prepared to make an association between pecking and starvation. The hungrier they are, the harder they peck, and it never occurs to them that taking a rest might be the answer.

      Similarly, they learn quickly to fly away to avoid a shock but only with great difficulty to peck a key to stop the shock. Again, it makes sense. Hopping or flying away from an unpleasant stimulus is a good idea. Pecking, as a rule, would not help.

      Humans may also have degrees of preparedness to develop fears. Watson and Rayner’s experiment with Little Albert (described in the last chapter), showed that he learnt instantly to fear the furry rat, and many other similar objects, after the experimenters startled him with a loud noise while he was playing. He did not take against the scientists conducting the work, who quite clearly deserved it, which suggests he was more ready to fear animals than people. Another researcher gave children common household objects like curtains and blocks to play with, delivered a sudden loud noise, and found they developed no fear at all. In yet another similar experiment, children remained robustly unafraid of a wooden duck.

      This may be an important СКАЧАТЬ