Helen Saul - Phobias - Fighting the Fear

The cortex has left and right halves with different functions. If social submissiveness is processed in the cortex, our reaction may depend on where the human face is when we see it. Negative emotion and perception of faces are believed to be processed in the right hemisphere in right-handed people. Information from the left side of someone’s visual field is also processed in the right hemisphere. If someone sees an angry face in their left visual field and the information goes straight to the hemisphere adapted to process it, they may react more vigorously than if the information is sent to the other side of the brain. There are lots of ifs here, but volunteers did react more strongly to a flash picture of an angry face when it was shown to their left rather than right visual field.

If fear of small animals is processed by the oldest parts of the brain, deep down where there is little difference between right and left sides, there ought to be little difference whether the slides are shown to the right or left visual field. This turned out to be true. People’s reactions were similar, regardless of where the slides were flashed up, which supports the idea that this reaction developed early in evolution.

Information on ancient threats is processed first by ancient parts of the brain, according to Öhman. Colour, texture, smell or type of movement may be sufficient to trigger this automatic response and we react immediately and instinctively. We may even have special pathways in the brain for transmitting information about ancient threats, pathways which existed before sophisticated reason and logic and which are physically distinct from those carrying conscious thought. This ancient reaction can produce a groundswell of emotion which colours our thoughts even before the higher brain has engaged and started to make us aware of a potential threat.

Like Seligman, Öhman suggests that responses to ancient threats are easier to establish and harder to extinguish than responses to unnatural or modern cues. It certainly provides a neat explanation for the reactions that may underpin many phobias. The reality is, unfortunately, less straightforward and Öhman’s results have proved fragile. There are many detractors, and even some supporters of the theory have been unable to come up with the same answers.

An American group led by Edwin Cook, himself an advocate of evolution theory, set out to repeat some of Öhman’s work. They used a similar set-up and were surprised to find that reactions to spiders and snakes were as easy to induce as modern fears of guns. It was also equally easy to eliminate them. In direct contrast to Öhman’s predictions, reactions to spiders disappeared as quickly as reactions to guns.

Cook used an unpleasant noise rather than an electric shock, so his volunteers received no tactile stimulus. When he added a vibratory stimulus to the hand, his experiments started to distinguish between modern and ancient threats, but the results were unconvincing. There was still no difference in acquisition or extinction of fears, though Cook found an increased heart rate associated with spiders or snakes and not guns.

When Cook followed Öhman’s protocol to the letter, he confirmed that fear of ancient objects was more resilient than that of modern threats. But the difference was slight. Overall, Cook’s work provided only flimsy support for Öhman and also raised questions about the relevance of some features of the experiment.

Cook was not the only one to have trouble replicating Öhman’s work. An American duo, Richard McNally from Chicago medical school and Edna Foa from Pennsylvania, changed mushrooms for strawberries in Öhman’s experiments. This was enough to eliminate differences in reactions to threatening and non-threatening objects. Even people who were phobic of snakes or spiders before the experiment reacted to strawberries just as strongly.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment to advocates of the theory is that it has little impact in the phobia clinic. Despite the predictions of Seligman and Öhman that fears of ancient threats are more easily acquired, more deeply ingrained and harder to reverse, this seems not to be the case. The Scottish and Sri Lankan studies mentioned earlier both found that the vast majority of phobias in these two quite different countries are related to ancient threats. However, neither study linked phobias of ancient threats to more severe impairment. Zafiropoulou, who led the Scottish study, said that success of treatment was unrelated to the type of phobia and suggested that the concept of phobias as vestiges of our ancient past is little practical use.

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