OUGD405 Studio Brief 04 Prevention of the Learning of Fears

In Studio Brief 02 I found that a number of fears are in fact learned form parents and those around people when they are young. If your mother screams at an insect, you will associate bad things and fear with insects. My solution seeks to associate positive things with insects to stop this fear from progressing from one generation to the next but as part of the brief we were asked to cite the need for our solution and how it might work. So, I have collected some extracts from an article which cite this self same problem that I shall be attempting to solve in this brief.

Phobias are learnt from our parents rather than hard-wired, a new study suggests. 

Fear of snakes is one of the most common phobias in the UK with almost half the population terrified of them, even though most have never even seen a snake. 

In the study babies were shown videos of a snake and a non-threatening animal and were played recordings of happy and then fearful adult voices. They spent more time looking at the video of the snake when listening to fearful voices but showed no signs of fear themselves, suggesting they learn to associate snakes with fear, which can then develop into a phobia.

The other common phobia is spiders with half of women and a fifth of men thought to be scared of them. 

Many scientists have claimed that such phobias evolved millions of years ago when we lived alongside potentially dangerous animals and learnt to fear and avoid those that could cause us harm. This new study challenges this belief that such phobias are inate.

Dr Vanessa LoBue of Rutgers University, an author of the paper explained to the Daily Mail:

'What we’re suggesting is that we have these biases to detect things like snakes and spiders really quickly, and to associate them with things that are yucky or bad, like a fearful voice. Babies detect snakes quickly - and then learn to be afraid of them really quickly"

http://www.netmums.com/coffeehouse/general-coffeehouse-chat-514/news-current-affairs-topical-discussion-12/524692-parents-pass-their-phobias-their-children-all.html