Discuss the theory of evolutionary preparedness and how it may apply to specific phobia, social phobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Pain from a phobia can be a distressing and debilitating condition. Phobias cause physiological responses, which can influence daily activities, inhibiting life experiences, and opportunities. Although more people are likely to encounter disturbing non-biological stimuli, evidence indicates that phobias have a biological basis, i.e. most phobias are focused on the fear of biological stimuli.

Explanation:

Phobias are based on personal developmental conditioning, however, according to preparedness philosophy, and are ready to handle paranoia-specific stimuli that threaten life, such as venomous snakes. These same stimuli we are most likely to fear have affected our evolutionary origins. People and chimpanzees seem genetically primed to identify certain artifacts with fear than other objects swiftly. And there are many types of anxiety disorders, the majority of samples were contaminated and circumstances that were a danger to our ancestral. The primates as well as humans that had this swift procurement of fear are much more able to persist and pass on one's genes. The fear itself is not hereditary, it's the ability to quickly create those relations. Acquiring perceptions of social stimuli that indicated threat-angry or disdainful faces was also beneficial. So social phobias can have evolutionary foundations. OCD's most popular concern-waste and soil-was also a hazard to our fathers, and would have the same form of component of disaster preparedness. Seligman (1971) said maybe we just evolved to be conditioned to be more afraid of certain things today than of others. Seligman thought so much less input was needed to learn a ready-made economic stimulus direct association than a good non-prepared one. If evolution by natural selection prepares us to learn to fear small fire, we will make a connection between fear, etc and fire much faster than between the fear and a good non-prepared stimulus like a black rock. These things in life included types of situations that early on in their evolution can be dangerous / threatening to humans and animals, such as those for fire, deep water, thunder and lightning, and heights. All of those are common today phobias. Besides, the evolutionary theory of phobias implies that we have genes of fear for these objects passed down to us from our ancestors, causing us to be more 'prepared' to avoid things that were dangerous to early human beings, making us more likely to avoid these things than objects that were not dangerous to them in the past.