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Deep Learning Technology: Sebastian Arnold, Betty van Aken, Paul Grundmann, Felix A. Gers and Alexander Löser. Learning Contextualized Document Representations for Healthcare Answer Retrieval. The Web Conference 2020 (WWW'20)
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Exposure therapy is the most common way to treat pyrophobia. This method involves showing patients fires in order of increasing size, from a lit cigarette up to a stove or grill flame.
Another method of treatment is talk therapy, in which a patient tells a therapist about the cause of this fear. This can calm the patient to make them less afraid of controlled fire.
People can relieve pyrophobia by interacting with other pyrophobes to share their experiences that caused fear. Alternatively, pyrophobia can be treated using hypnosis.
Medication can also be used to treat pyrophobic people, although since it has side effects, the method is not highly recommended.
As with most phobias this fear could be cured with therapy. Relaxation techniques or support groups could also be effective.
Exposure therapy has been proven as an effective treatment for people who have a fear of bees. It is recommended that people place themselves in a comfortable open environment, such as a park or garden, and gradually over a prolonged period of time move closer to the bees. This process should not be rushed, it may take many months spent watching bees before people feel comfortable in their presence.
Apiphobia is one of the zoophobias prevalent in young children and may prevent them from taking part in any outdoor activities. Older people control the natural fear of bees more easily. However, some adults face hardships of controlling the fear of bees.
A recommended way of overcoming child's fear of bees is training to face fears (a common approach for treating specific phobias). Programs vary.
Anxiety around mirrors and at all costs staying away from mirrors
There are many ways to treat ailurophobia; treatment is usually carried out by a psychiatrist or other therapy specialist.
One strongly motivated patient was able to recover by slowly becoming accustomed to cat fur by first touching varying types of velvet, then becoming accustomed to a toy kitten, and finally a live kitten which the patient subsequently adopted.
There are several options for treatment of scopophobia. With one option, desensitization, the patient is stared at for a prolonged period and then describes their feelings. The hope is that the individual will either be desensitized to being stared at or will discover the root of their scopophobia.
Exposure therapy, another treatment commonly prescribed, has five steps:
- Evaluation
- Feedback
- Developing a fear hierarchy
- Exposure
- Building
In the evaluation stage, the scopophobic individual would describe their fear to the therapist and try to find out when and why this fear developed. The feedback stage is when the therapist offers a way of treating the phobia. A fear hierarchy is then developed, where the individual creates a list of scenarios involving their fear, with each one becoming worse and worse. Exposure involves the individual being exposed to the scenarios and situations in their fear hierarchy. Finally, building is when the patient, comfortable with one step, moves on to the next.
As with many human health problems support groups exist for scopophobic individuals. Being around other people who face the same issues can often create a more comfortable environment.
Other suggested treatments for scopophobia include hypnotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and energy psychology. In extreme cases of scopophobia, it is possible for the subject to be prescribed anti–anxiety medications. Medications may include benzodiazepines, antidepressants, or beta-blockers.
There have been a number of studies into using virtual reality therapy for acrophobia.
Many different types of medications are used in the treatment of phobias like fear of heights, including traditional anti-anxiety drugs such as benzodiazepines, and newer options like antidepressants and beta-blockers.
This method forces patients to face their fears by complete exposure to whatever fear they are experiencing. This is usually done in a progressive manner starting with lesser exposures and moving upward towards severe exposures. For example, a claustrophobic patient would start by going into an elevator and work up to an MRI. Several studies have proven this to be an effective method in combating various phobias, claustrophobia included. S.J. Rachman has also tested the effectiveness of this method in treating claustrophobia and found it to decrease fear and negative thoughts/connotations by an average of nearly 75% in his patients. Of the methods he tested in this particular study, this was by far the most significant reduction.
This method attempts to recreate internal physical sensations within a patient in a controlled environment and is a less intense version of in vivo exposure. This was the final method of treatment tested by S.J. Rachman in his 1992 study. It lowered fear and negative thoughts/connotations by about 25%. These numbers did not quite match those of in vivo exposure or cognitive therapy, but still resulted in significant reductions.
Other forms of treatment that have also been shown to be reasonably effective are psychoeducation, counter-conditioning, regressive hypnotherapy and breathing re-training. Medications often prescribed to help treat claustrophobia include anti-depressants and beta-blockers, which help to relieve the heart-pounding symptoms often associated with anxiety attacks.
The most common treatment for serious cases is behavior therapy—specifically, systematic desensitization.
Several other self-help treatments exist, mainly involving exposure therapy and relaxation techniques while driving. Additional driving training and practice with a certified teacher also help many to become more confident and less likely to suffer from anxiety.
One of the emerging methods of treating this fear is through the use of virtual therapy.
With repeated exposure, all of the subjects displayed significantly less variance from normal in heart rate acceleration, depression readings, subjective distress, and post-traumatic stress disorder ratings.
The most common cause of pyrophobia is that fire poses a potential danger, such as house fire, wildfire, and getting caught on fire. Some people who are intensely pyrophobic cannot even get close to or tolerate even a small controlled fire, such as fireplace, bonfire or lit candle. In many cases a bad childhood experience with fire may have triggered the condition.
The fear of trains is anxiety and fear associated with trains, railways, and railway travel.
Psychonalysts, starting from Freud himself, associated sensations towards travel by train with sexuality. In 1906 Freud wrote that the link of railway travel and sexuality derives from the pleasurable sensation of shaking during the travel. Therefore, in the event of repression of sexuality the person will experience anxiety when confronted with railway travel. Karl Abraham interpreted the fear of the uncontrollable motion of a train as a projection of the fear of uncontrolled sexuality. Wilhelm Stekel (1908) also associated train phobia with rocking sensation, but in addition to libido repression, he associated it with the embarrassment with the reminiscences of the rocking sensation of the early childhood.
Gephyrophobia is the anxiety disorder or specific phobia characterized by the fear of bridges. As a result, sufferers of gephyrophobia may avoid routes that will take them over bridges.
Some possible explanations of gephyrophobia may be the fear of driving off the bridge, the fear of a gust of wind taking one off the bridge, a fear of the structural integrity of the bridges itself, or the fear that the bridge will collapse if they try to cross it. The fear overlaps with acrophobia, the fear of heights, as gephyrophobia tends to be exacerbated in tall bridges vs. ones close to the water/ground beneath.
Dr. Michael Liebowitz, founder of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, says, "It's not an isolated phobia, but usually part of a larger constellation ... It's people who get panic attacks. You get light-headed, dizzy; your heart races. You become afraid that you'll feel trapped." It is a situational phobia.
The New York State Thruway Authority will lead gephyrophobiacs over the Tappan Zee Bridge. A driver can call the authority in advance and arrange for someone to drive the car over the bridge for them. The authority performs the service about six times a year.
The Maryland Transportation Authority offers a similar service for crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
The Mackinac Bridge Authority, which oversees the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas, will drive one's car across its span for any needy gephyrophobiacs. Some thousand drivers take advantage of this free program each year. Leslie Ann Pluhar had her Yugo blown off that bridge. Later investigation showed the driver had stopped her car over the open steel grating on the bridge's span and that a gust of wind through the grating blew her vehicle off the bridge, although this is not supported by recorded wind speed measurements taken on and around the bridge at the time of the accident.
The term "gephyrophobia" comes from Greek γέφυρα ("gephura") meaning "bridge" and φόβος ("phobos") "fear".
Myrmecophobia is the inexplicable fear of ants. It is a type of specific phobia. It is common for those who suffer from myrmecophobia to also have a wider fear of insects in general. Such a condition is known as entomophobia. This fear can manifest itself in several ways, such as a fear of ants contaminating a person's food supply, or fear of a home invasion by large numbers of ants.
The term "myrmecophobia" comes from the Greek , "myrmex", meaning "ant" and , "phóbos", "fear".
Acrophobia (from the , "ákron", meaning "peak, summit, edge" and , "phóbos", "fear") is an extreme or irrational fear or phobia of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up. It belongs to a category of specific phobias, called space and motion discomfort, that share both similar causes and options for treatment.
Most people experience a degree of natural fear when exposed to heights, known as the fear of falling. On the other hand, those who have little fear of such exposure are said to have a head for heights. A head for heights is advantageous for those hiking or climbing in mountainous terrain and also in certain jobs e.g. steeplejacks or wind turbine mechanics.
Acrophobia sufferers can experience a panic attack in high places and become too agitated to get themselves down safely. Approximately 2–5% of the general population suffers from acrophobia, with twice as many women affected as men.
Aichmophobia () is a kind of specific phobia, the morbid fear of sharp things, such as pencils, needles, knives, a pointing finger, or even the sharp end of an umbrella and different sorts of protruding corners or sharp edges in furnitures and building constructions/materials. It is derived from the Greek "aichmē" (point) and "phobos" (fear). This fear may also be referred to as belonephobia or enetophobia.
Sometimes this general term is used to refer to what is more specifically called fear of needles, or needle phobia. Fear of needles is the extreme and irrational fear of medical procedures involving injections or hypodermic needles.
Not to be confused with similar condition (Avoidance behavior) the Visual looming syndrome, where the patient does not fear sharp items, but feels pain or discomfort at gazing upon sharp objects nearby.
Ichthyophobia is described in "Psychology: An International Perspective" as an "unusual" specific phobia. Both symptoms and remedies of ichthyophobia are common to most specific phobias.
John B. Watson, a renowned name of behaviorism, describes an example, quoted in many books in psychology, of conditioned fear of a goldfish in an infant and a way of unconditioning of the fear by what is called now graduated exposure therapy:
In contrast, radical exposure therapy was used successfully to cure a man with a "life affecting" fish phobia on the 2007 documentary series, "The Panic Room".
As is common with specific phobias, an occasional fright may give rise to abnormal anxiety that requires treatment. An abnormal fear of bats may be treated by any standard treatment for specific phobias. Due to the fact that the fear is not life altering, it can usually just be left untreated.
The phobia manifests itself in different ways. For most people it is less about fear than about loathing, similar to the reaction many people have to snakes or rats. Some people experience it almost all the time, others just in response to direct stimuli. Some possible situations that can trigger the loathing of cats are: hearing purring, seeing a cat in real life, imagining the possibility of a cat touching or rubbing against one, the thought of meeting a cat in the dark, seeing the staring eyes of a cat (cats have the tendency to stare at passers-by) cats in pictures and on television, and cat-like toys and cat-like fur. Big cats such as lions or tigers can also trigger the stimuli associated with a phobia.
Phobias of this sort can usually be treated by different types of therapies, including: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), psychotherapy, behavior therapy and exposure therapy.
Practice may play an important part in overcoming fear. It may be helpful to sufferers to increase phone usage at a slow pace, starting with simple calls and gradually working their way up. For example, they may find it easier to start with automated calls, move on to conversations with family and friends, and then further extend both the length of conversations and the range of people with whom conversations are held.
Necrophobia is a specific phobia which is the irrational fear of dead things (e.g., corpses) as well as things associated with death (e.g., coffins, tombstones, funerals, cemeteries). With all types of emotions, obsession with death becomes evident in both fascination and objectification. In a cultural sense, necrophobia may also be used to mean a fear of the dead by a cultural group, e.g., a belief that the spirits of the dead will return to haunt the living.
Symptoms include: shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, dry mouth and shaking, feeling sick and uneasy, psychological instability, and an altogether feeling of dread and trepidation. The sufferer may feel this phobia all the time. The sufferer may also experience this sensation when something triggers the fear, like a close encounter with a dead animal or the funeral of a loved one or friend. The fear may have developed when a person witnessed a death, or was forced to attend a funeral as a child. Some people experience this after viewing frightening media.
The fear can manifest itself as a serious condition. Treatment options include medication and therapy.
The word "necrophobia" is derived from the Greek "nekros" () for "corpse" and the Greek "phobos" () for "fear".
Nyctophobia is a phobia characterized by a severe fear of the dark. It is triggered by the brain’s disfigured perception of what would, or could happen when in a dark environment. It can also be temporarily triggered if the mind is unsteady or scared about recent events or ideas, or a partaking in content the brain considers a threat (examples could include indulging in horror content, witnessing vulgar actions, or having linked dark environments to prior events or ideas that disturb the mind). Normally, since humans are not nocturnal by nature, humans are usually a bit more cautious or alert at night than in the day, since the dark is a vastly different environment. Nyctophobia produces symptoms beyond the normal instinctive parameters, such as breathlessness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking, heart palpitations, inability to speak or think clearly or sensation of detachment from reality and death. Nyctophobia can be severely detrimental physically and mentally if these symptoms are not resolved. There are many types of therapies to help manage Nyctophobia. Exposure therapy can be very effective when exposing the person to darkness. With this method a therapist can help with relaxation strategies such as meditation. Another form of therapy is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Therapists can help guide patients with behavior routines that are performed daily and nightly to reduce the symptoms associated with Nyctophobia. In severe cases anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication drugs can be effective to those dealing with symptoms that may not be manageable if therapy could not reduce the symptoms of Nyctophobia.
Despite its pervasive nature, there has been a lack of etiological research on the subject. Nyctophobia is generally observed in children but, according to J. Adrian Williams’ article titled, "Indirect Hypnotic Therapy of Nyctophobia: A Case Report", many clinics with pediatric patients have a great chance of having adults who have nyctophobia. The same article states that “the phobia has been known to be extremely disruptive to adult patients and… incapacitating”.
The word "nyctophobia" comes from the Greek νυκτός, "nyktos", genitive of νύξ, "nyx", "night" and φόβος, "phobos", "fear". The fear of darkness or night has several non-clinical terminologies—"lygophobia", "scotophobia" and "achluophobia".
Fear of surgery or other invasive medical procedure may be known as tomophobia. Fear of surgery is not a fear experienced often, but is still just as harmful as those that are more common. Since surgery is not a common occurrence, the fear is more based on inexperience or something that is out of the ordinary. This fear is one of those categorized under all fears of medical procedures that can be experienced by anyone, all ages, and have little need for actual psychological treatment, unless it is uncharacteristically causing the patient to react in a way that would be harmful to his or her health.
Historically, the Navajo people were described as being ichthyophobic, due to their aversion to fish. However, this was later recognised as a cultural or mythic aversion to aquatic animals, and not a psychological condition.