When you look at the photo above, perhaps you see : 1) A delicious-looking much-loved chocolate bar renowned for its unique bubbly texture. or 2) A nightmarish and disgusting depiction of tightly clustered holes. If your reaction leans more towards the latter, it’s possible that you are suffering from trypophobia. Which is (currently being) defined […]
Tag: phobia
Virtual cockroaches alleviate fear of cockroaches
Not many people with a fear of, say, cockroaches, would be happy to let a few of them roam across their bare hands (in order to alleviate their fears by habituation). In other words: “Although in vivo exposure is the treatment of choice for specific phobias, some acceptability problems have been associated with it.” In […]
Fear of flying (amongst pilots)
Although there are a good number of academic papers which examine ‘fear of flying’, [recent example] the number of scholarly dissertations which cover ‘fear of flying’ amongst a specific subset of air travellers – viz. pilots – is very low. Perhaps just one. May we recommend the work of aviation practitioner, aviation historian, aviation philosopher, […]
Dapanophobia: “Morbid penuriousness”
To those who compile collections of trivial and spurious words for phobias: here’s a brand new old one to add to the list. From the November 19, 1904 New York Medical Journal, volume LXXX (issue 21), page 987: Web searches for “dapanophobia” finds absolutely nothing, except for this one paragraph published in various venues. “δαπανοφοβία” finds nothing […]
Filling a Gap in our Knowledge of a Fear of Holes
This research paper is one of the first to make repeated use of the word “trypophobia”: “Fear of Holes,” Geoff G. Cole [pictured here] and Arnold J. Wilkins, Psychological Science, epub August 27, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Essex, UK, explain: “Phobias […]