Fear Of Dark

Fear Of Dark

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Were you scared of the dark growing up? Or maybe you still are! It's not too uncommon for adults either. When you're young, being afraid of the dark goes hand in hand with some other fears, like ghosts, monsters, or other spooky things. And as you get older, you may not use that kind of explanation.  But these irrational fears still stick around, because there are a lot of ways we learn to be afraid. The good news is: research has shown that there are ways to combat these fears. The way we usually create fear is a perceived part of the psyche. Most of the time, it's through classical conditioning. This is when you pair a neutral stimulus — something that doesn’t make you feel anything — with something that you have an automatic reaction to. For example, imagine a person who is usually cold with dogs. But then, a dog bites her and she has to go to the hospital. That’d make anybody freak out a bit. Then, the neutral stimulus can become a conditioned stimulus, which gives you the same automatic reaction. In other words, after that experience, this person is more likely to be afraid when she sees a dog. Some phobias, which are extreme or irrational fears, can be caused by classical conditioning, including a fear of the dark. Research in animals and humans has found that conditioned responses are probably linked with the amygdala. This is an area of the brain that is activated when people are scared or have a lot of emotional emotions, such as excitement and anger. So conditioned fears kind of make sense: they’re based on something that happened to you. And some surveys have found that most children have had a bad experience with the thing they’re scared of, like spiders or the dark.

But other phobias are of things that you’ve never actually experienced. Like, arachnophobia is one of the top fears in the world, but most people haven’t been attacked by spiders. Some survey results, including one sample of over 1,000 children and teenagers, suggest that we might learn these fears because of modeling. For example, when your older brother sees a spider and goes out, do the same. Or, where shark attacks are a huge threat or a horror movie where the killer lurks in the darkness. Even more common in that survey was learning through instructional fear acquisition — when someone tells you to be afraid of something. This can happen if your mom warns you to watch out for snakes, or when news broadcasters talk about terrorist attacks, even though the actual statistics say you're much more likely to die of something like a heart attack. This is because people tend to use an availability heuristic in their reasoning, meaning they use what’s readily available to their minds. It’s hard to remember the exact statistics about terrorism and heart disease, but boy, that last story you saw on the news sticks with you. And it probably wasn’t about a heart attack. When researchers run studies and try to condition people to fear something neutral — like associating a certain tone with a mild shock — they're more successful if they tell people what to be afraid of beforehand. Now, across all these studies, some psychologists noticed a weird pattern: some phobias are easier to create than others in certain species.

For example, scientists have observed that it's easier for primates to develop a fear of snakes or spiders — but not of something like rabbits. They call this phenomenon biological preparedness. We can't say for sure why it happens, but one idea is that these fears are somehow ingrained in our ancestors’ behaviors. Like, all mammals might be warier around snakes and lizards, because the first mammals could’ve been eaten by ancient reptiles. Some ecologists looked into an evolutionary reason for fearing the dark, based on risk from predators, by studying some regions of Tanzania where lion attacks are a threat to humans. Using data from more than two decades and a thousand lion attacks, they found that most attacks occurred immediately after sunset in the dark. Later, but people are still wandering around. But they also found that attacks were up to four times more common in the ten days after a full moon than the period before, which is when the darkest part of the night is also right after sunset. So if that pattern of lions attacking humans in the dark was also true millennia ago, Scientists have guessed that people might be predisposed to be afraid of the dark because we adapted to the risk of predator attacks. But this is one of the first studies suggesting that darkness increased that risk. But it's worth taking these evolutionary hypotheses with a grain of salt. It’s not like anyone’s run a study where they assigned some people to a lion-risk condition and others to a no-lion condition, and then waited for generations to see what fears develop. So we’ve got a couple of good ideas about where phobias come from. And if you have phobias, psychologists have found ways to treat them. Many randomized trials have shown that one of the most effective treatments is called exposure therapy, which is basically just conditioning. You slowly expose yourself to what you're afraid of in small doses — like turning off the light for five seconds, being in the same room like a spider, or meeting groups of strangers — until you don’t have a bad reaction anymore. Then you move the spider a little closer, leave the lights out longer, or meet more people — until the phobia has less power over you. Now, fear is a complicated thing.