99 Fun Facts About Phobia

Arachnophobia is the fear of which creatures?

Spiders can set off arachnophobia through nothing more than a web or a photograph, yet the dread far outruns the danger: most arachnids pose little threat to people.

Acrophobia is the fear of what?

Heights unsettle us from infancy: in the classic 'visual cliff' experiment, most crawling babies refused to cross a sheet of glass laid over an apparent drop.

Coulrophobia is the fear of what?

Clowns unsettle people, researchers suggest, because the make-up hides the real face and distorts its expressions, so nobody can tell what is going on underneath.

The 'coulro-' in coulrophobia comes from a Greek word meaning what?

Ancient Greek had no clowns as such, so the coiners borrowed kolobathristes; Oxford Dictionaries only added the word in 2010.

Someone with claustrophobia fears what?

Confined spaces such as lifts, tunnels and windowless rooms are the classic triggers, and steering clear of them backfires: avoidance tends to reinforce the fear.

Agoraphobia takes its name from the Greek word for what?

The marketplace, or agora, was the open heart of a Greek city; Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal borrowed the word in 1871 for three patients seized by dread in the city's public places.

Which condition is described by the word glossophobia?

Dread of public speaking takes its name from glossa, Greek for tongue; the body can read an audience as a threat and fire its fight-or-flight response, flooding the speaker with adrenaline.

Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of which number?

Thirteen owes its bad name partly to the Last Supper, where tradition seats thirteen at the table with Judas among them, and the unease lingers: some hotels still have no 13th floor.

Tetraphobia, common in East Asia, is the fear of which number?

In several East Asian languages the word for four sounds like the word for death.

Trypophobia is an aversion to what?

Clusters of small holes, as in a honeycomb or a lotus pod, may repel us for a reason: one theory holds that the brain links such patterns with danger, because several venomous animals carry similar markings.

Nomophobia, first named in a 2008 UK survey, is the fear of what?

Being without your mobile phone worried about 53% of the phone owners surveyed, who admitted anxiety over a lost handset, a dead battery or no signal; the label squashes together 'no mobile phone phobia'.

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the tongue-in-cheek name for the fear of what?

Long words get a deliberately monstrous name: it pads out sesquipedalian, from the poet Horace's jibe at 'words a foot and a half long', with a hippopotamus and a monster to make it longer still.

Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of what?

Peanut butter stuck to the roof of the mouth sounds too silly for a medical term, and it is: the mock-Latin label, from arachis (peanut) and butyrum (butter), has been a running joke in print since the 1970s.

Which phobia is the fear of beards?

Pogonophobia made headlines in 2013, when Jeremy Paxman accused his BBC bosses of it after viewers and newspapers mocked the beard he had grown to present Newsnight.

Ophidiophobia is the fear of which animals?

Snakes seem to have a hotline into the primate brain: in a 2013 study, neurons in monkeys' visual system fired more strongly at photographs of them than at pictures of monkey faces.

Cynophobia is the fear of which animals?

Dogs are so common that cynophobia is unusually hard to live with: in severe cases people stay indoors or stop visiting friends for fear of meeting one.

Musophobia is the fear of what?

Mice and rats were long said to scare even elephants: the Roman writer Pliny the Elder claimed elephants have 'the greatest aversion to the mouse of all animals' and refuse fodder one has touched.

Which phobia is the fear of the sea or of being in the ocean?

Thalassophobia is not a fear of water itself, which is aquaphobia: what frightens sufferers is the sea's depth and vastness, and whatever might be living down there.

Nyctophobia is a severe fear of what?

Night and darkness are often not the real fear: sufferers dread what the dark might be hiding, an alarm some researchers trace to ancestors who slept in the open while predators hunted.

Emetophobia is the fear of what?

Vomiting frightens people with emetophobia into rearranging their lives: they may avoid restaurants, boats and unfamiliar food, and some women put off pregnancy for fear of morning sickness.

Mysophobia is the fear of what?

Germs and dirt can lock sufferers into ritual: the term was coined in 1879 for a patient who washed their hands again and again, and marathon handwashing is still its hallmark.

Gephyrophobia is the fear of crossing what?

Bridges unnerve enough drivers that Michigan's Mackinac Bridge offers a remedy: for a small fee, a member of staff will take the wheel and drive the nervous motorist's car across.

Koumpounophobia, an aversion often attributed to Apple's Steve Jobs, is the fear of what?

Buttons bothered Jobs, by many accounts, and the aversion is offered as the reason for his turtlenecks and his taste for touchscreens; koumpi is the modern Greek for button.

Anatidaephobia, the 'fear that somewhere a duck is watching you', comes from where?

A Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson coined it as a gag: the name grafts Anatidae, the real zoological family of ducks, geese and swans, onto a fear nobody has.

Which fear is described by phasmophobia?

Ghosts gave a hit video game its title: in Phasmophobia (2020), a small team of players turn ghost hunter and must identify what kind of spirit is haunting each house.

Ergophobia is the fear of what?

Work is ergon in Greek, which is why physicists measure work in ergs and ergonomics studies people at work; even the word 'energy' grows from the same root.

Which condition is described by phobophobia?

Dread of dread itself feeds on its own symptoms: sufferers fear the racing heart and dizziness that fear brings, so the first flutter of anxiety can snowball into a panic attack.

Globophobia is the fear of what?

Balloons are feared mostly for what they might do next: the commonest trigger is the bang of one bursting, so sufferers may refuse to touch a balloon or even go near one.

Alektorophobia is the fear of which farm animals?

Chickens get the name from alektor, the Greek for a rooster, and the birds need not even be present: for some sufferers a photograph or a video of one is enough to bring on the fear.

Phobos, the Greek god of fear whose name is the root of the word phobia, was the son of which god?

Ares, god of war, took his sons Phobos and Deimos, fear and terror, into battle with him, which is why the two moons of Mars, his Roman counterpart, carry their names.

According to Wikipedia's summary of the research, which three phobias are the most common?

Specific phobias affect about 6-8% of people in Western countries each year and usually begin between the ages of 10 and 17.

The DSM-5's five specific phobia subtypes are animal, natural environment, situational, other, and what?

Blood-injection-injury phobia can cost sufferers their health: to stay clear of their triggers, they may skip vaccinations, blood tests and even hospital visits.

Why does a phobia of needles and injuries often cause fainting?

Heart rate and pressure spike, then plunge, briefly starving the brain of blood; therapists teach 'applied tension', clenching the muscles on cue, to push the pressure back up.

Trypanophobia, a common reason people put off medical care, is the fear of what?

Needles take the name from the Greek trypanon, a borer, and the fear has real costs: sufferers may refuse vaccines, blood tests and drips rather than face one.

Which is the recommended first-line treatment for specific phobias?

Exposure therapy does the opposite of what a phobia urges: instead of avoiding the feared thing, the patient meets it in gradual, safe steps until it loses its grip.

Joseph Wolpe's 1950s phobia treatment, pairing deep relaxation with a ladder of ever-scarier steps, is called systematic what?

Desensitisation grew out of Wolpe's experiments with frightened laboratory cats, which lost their fear when he fed them while bringing back, a little at a time, the thing that scared them.

In the 1920 Little Albert experiment, John B. Watson conditioned a baby to fear which animal?

A white rat held no terror for baby Albert until it was paired with a frightening noise; soon he also shrank from a rabbit, a fur coat and a Santa Claus mask.

How did Watson and Rayner produce the frightening noise in the Little Albert experiment?

Striking a steel bar with a hammer just behind the baby's head made him cry, and after seven such pairings over a week he wailed at the sight of the animal alone.

Which Hitchcock film stars James Stewart as a detective crippled by acrophobia?

Vertigo shows its hero's terror with a shot devised for the film: the camera pulls back while the lens zooms in, so the stairwell below him seems to stretch away.

Hitchcock's The Birds, a nightmare for anyone with ornithophobia, was based on a story by which author?

Daphne du Maurier set her 1952 story on the Cornish coast; Hitchcock kept little but the title and the attacks, moving them to California and having his screenwriter invent new characters.

In the 1990 horror comedy Arachnophobia, which actor plays Delbert McClintock?

John Goodman played the part in Frank Marshall's first film as director, and the studio's marketing pushed a new word for its mix of scares and laughs: 'thrill-omedy'.

Which 1986 Stephen King novel popularised the evil clown with its shape-shifting Pennywise?

It is the monster's name as well as the title: a shape-shifter that feeds on children's fear, wakes every 27 years and favours the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

Which rock star's fear of flying sent him home from a 1973 Japan tour by Trans-Siberian train?

David Bowie had already crossed the Atlantic by ship rather than fly; his old schoolfriend Geoff MacCormack shared the long rail journey across the Soviet Union to Moscow.

After which event did Americans' switch from flying to driving push up road deaths?

The September 11 attacks made flying feel deadly, yet psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer found the switch to cars cost more American lives than were lost by passengers on the hijacked planes.

Which hospital scan is best known for setting off claustrophobia?

MRI means lying still inside a tunnel-shaped machine, often for half an hour or more, so hospitals offer anxious patients a calming medicine or a roomier 'open' scanner.

Phobias belong to which broad family of mental health conditions?

Anxiety disorders include phobias, though most fears never qualify: a diagnosis needs a dread out of proportion to the danger that has lasted about six months and disrupts daily life.

Specific phobias usually begin at which stage of life?

Childhood or adolescence is when most specific phobias begin, and they become less common with age, not more; women are affected about twice as often as men.

Which almond-shaped structure deep in the brain processes fear?

The amygdala's role is clearest in a patient known as S.M., whose amygdalae were destroyed by a rare disease: researchers walked her through a haunted house and she showed no fear at all.

Which psychologist proposed three pathways to phobias: conditioning, vicarious and informational?

Social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia are thought to have roughly 50% heritability, with environment covering the rest.

Which everyday food did suspense director Alfred Hitchcock say he was frightened of, insisting that they revolted him?

Eggs frightened the master of suspense, who asked whether anything was more revolting than a yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid. He claimed never to have tasted it.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is the fear of which number, removed by the Reagans from their Bel Air address?

666 is the 'number of the beast' in the Book of Revelation, so when Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to 666 St. Cloud Road in 1989 they had the house renumbered 668.

Taphophobia led inventors to build 'safety coffins' fitted with signal bells, because sufferers feared what?

Being buried alive worried George Washington so much that he asked for his body to be laid out for three days first. Chopin went further and requested that his heart be cut out.

Which member of TV's A-Team feared flying so much that teammates drugged or knocked him out before trips by plane?

B. A. Baracus growled 'I ain't gettin' on no plane!' so often that it became a catchphrase, and the gag was worse whenever Murdock was the pilot. Mr. T played the tough mechanic.

Hydrophobia is a historical name for which viral disease, whose victims panic when offered liquids to drink?

Rabies causes uncontrollable throat spasms on swallowing, which is why late-stage patients recoil from a drink. The old name literally means 'fear of water'.

In George Orwell's 1984, which basement torture chamber confronts each prisoner with their own worst fear?

Room 101 held 'the worst thing in the world', which was different for every prisoner. Orwell named it after a BBC conference room where he had sat through tedious meetings.

Which acronym did a 2004 Harvard Business School magazine article coin for the worry that others are having more fun?

FOMO, the fear of missing out, first appeared in a column that Patrick McGinnis wrote for The Harbus. The same piece also coined FOBO, the fear of a better option.

In the Harry Potter books, which shape-shifting creature takes the form of whatever its victim fears most?

A Boggart is beaten with the Riddikulus charm, taught by Remus Lupin, which makes its appearance comical. Nobody knows what shape one takes when it is alone.

Which TV detective, played by Tony Shalhoub, claims to have 312 phobias, among them crowds, mushrooms and soccer riots?

Adrian Monk saw his fears and compulsions intensify after his wife Trudy was killed by a car bomb, which cost him his police badge. He solves San Francisco murders as a private consultant instead.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's reported fear of flying meant he made state visits to Russia and China by what?

Armored train carriages carried him on those trips, and the phobia ran in the family: his father, Kim Il Sung, was also afraid to fly.

Which Batman villain, psychologist Jonathan Crane, turns victims' phobias against them with a hallucinogenic toxin?

Scarecrow was bullied as a boy, grew obsessed with terror and became a professor at Gotham University specialising in phobias. His gas debuted in a 1967 comic as a simple bag of dust.

Which US president used his 1933 inaugural address to say 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'?

Franklin Roosevelt took office at the depth of the Great Depression, and went on to call that fear a 'nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror'. The line is often traced to the writer Thoreau.

Which Russian physiologist's conditioning experiments underpin the theory that phobias are learned by association?

Ivan Pavlov showed that dogs fed after a signal would soon salivate at the signal alone. The same 'Pavlovian model' explains many phobias: a harmless thing paired with a fright can become frightening too.

Which three-word phrase for the body's automatic reaction to a threat comes from physiologist Walter Cannon's research?

Fight or flight grew out of Cannon's 1915 wording, 'the necessities of fighting or flight'. The same surge is what makes a phobia set the pulse racing within seconds.

Which hormone, released by glands that sit on top of the kidneys, powers the body's instant response to fear?

Adrenaline takes its name from the Latin for 'on the kidney', matching where its glands sit. Americans often call it epinephrine, a Greek coinage that means exactly the same thing.

Pyrophobia shares its Greek root with the word 'pyrotechnics' and is the persistent fear of what?

Fire worries everyone within reason, so the label applies only when the fear goes beyond what is considered normal. Even a harmless candle can trigger shaking and a racing pulse.

Which billionaire aviator, reputed to have mysophobia, once shut himself in a darkened studio cinema for months?

Howard Hughes insisted on picking things up with tissues to shield himself from contamination. Leonardo DiCaprio played the record-setting pilot and film producer in The Aviator.

Which singer blamed forgotten lyrics in Central Park for the stage fright that kept her from touring until 1994?

Barbra Streisand blanked during her 1967 show and later recalled: 'I forgot the words in front of 125,000 people.' She announced her return to the concert stage in 1993.

Which actor plays Bob Wiley, a phobia-ridden patient who follows his therapist on vacation, in What About Bob?

Bill Murray's needy Bob is tied to a sailboat mast at one point to face his terror of sailing. Richard Dreyfuss played the exasperated therapist, and the two stars did not get along on set.

Which word for fear or hatred of foreigners did Dictionary.com name its Word of the Year for 2016?

Xenophobia lookups on the site jumped 938% on 24 June 2016, the day after Britain voted to leave the European Union. Its Greek roots mean 'stranger' and 'fear'.

Astraphobia reportedly sent the Roman emperor Augustus hiding in an underground vault, and is the fear of what?

Thunder and lightning so unnerved Augustus that he carried a sealskin everywhere as protection. The phobia is one that pets can develop as well as people.

Pediophobia often centres on lifeless eyes that seem to stare back, and is the fear of which playthings?

Dolls unsettle sufferers most when they are lifelike, and the fear can spread to mannequins and wax figures. Horror films such as Child's Play and The Conjuring cash in on it.

Gamophobia shares a Greek root with the words 'monogamy' and 'bigamy', and is the fear of what?

Marriage, or any long-term partnership, is what a gamophobe avoids, often out of worry that a partner will prove as unreliable as a childhood caregiver once did.

Philophobia has the same Greek root as 'philosophy' and 'philanthropy', and is the fear of doing what?

Falling in love is what a philophobe avoids, usually after emotional turmoil in an earlier relationship. The fear can also grow out of religious or cultural beliefs that prohibit romance.

Odontophobia, which leads sufferers to skip check-ups until an emergency strikes, is the fear of which professionals?

Dentists are feared for specific triggers such as the drill and the anaesthetic jab, or simply for the surgery setting as a whole. Milder cases are usually just called dental anxiety.

Photophobia, a common symptom of migraine, is not a true fear but physical discomfort in response to what?

Bright light causes real discomfort or soreness in the eyes, which is all the clinical term means. Cataracts and a scratched cornea are other common causes.

Aibohphobia, a joke name whose own spelling is the punchline, is the humorous term for a fear of what?

Palindromes read the same in both directions, and so does the word invented for fearing them: it is simply 'phobia' glued to its own mirror image.

In which country is 17 feared as unlucky because its Roman numeral, XVII, can be rearranged into VIXI, 'I have lived'?

Italy counts Friday the 17th as its day of misfortune, and Alitalia flew planes with no row 17. To a Roman, 'I have lived' was a way of saying 'I am dead'.

Taijin kyofusho, a social phobia recognised in Japan, turns the usual fear of embarrassment into a fear of doing what?

Offending others, whether by blushing, staring or body odour, is the worry at its core, whereas Western social anxiety centres on being judged oneself.

Nosophobia, a fear of having a disease, is nicknamed after which group, prone to imagining illnesses from textbooks?

Medical students so often decide they have whatever they are reading about that the condition is also known as second year syndrome, or 'medicalstudentitis'.

Which Dutch footballer was nicknamed the 'Non-Flying Dutchman' after vowing never to board a plane again in 1994?

Dennis Bergkamp gave up flying after the 1994 World Cup, later tracing the fear to trips in small planes with Inter Milan. He reached away matches by road or rail, or simply missed them.

Gymnophobia shares a Greek root with 'gymnasium', a clue to how ancient athletes trained, and is the fear of what?

Nudity was normal for athletes in ancient Greece, and 'gymnos' simply meant naked. Sufferers may worry about being seen undressed, about seeing someone else undressed, or both.

Algophobia comes from the same Greek word as 'analgesic' and 'neuralgia', and is the fear of what?

Pain that is merely expected can set it off: a classic case is an elderly person who hears about friends' ailments and begins to feel the results before anything has happened.

Chronophobia, nicknamed 'prison neurosis' because inmates are so prone to it, is the fear of what?

Time passing weighs on prisoners through the sheer length of a sentence, and the same anxiety was recorded in people quarantined during COVID-19. 'Chronos' is the Greek for time.

Thanatophobia, which Sigmund Freud suspected was a disguise for unresolved childhood conflicts, is the fear of what?

Death was personified by the Greeks as Thanatos, whom Homer described as the twin of Hypnos, or Sleep. Psychologists more often call the fear 'death anxiety'.

Radiophobia was widely reported among Soviet patients who had absorbed negligible doses in the wake of which disaster?

Chernobyl left many people who had received trivial doses with extreme anxiety and psychosomatic illness. Oddly, in the 1920s 'radiophobia' had meant a fear of radio broadcasting.

Which class of drugs, including propranolol, do some musicians and actors take to steady the tremor of stage fright?

Beta blockers dampen the physical symptoms of performance nerves, such as shaking hands. Models, athletes and professional dancers have been known to use them too.

Which phobia treatment, invented by Thomas Stampfl in 1967, puts patients directly into the situation they fear?

Flooding relies on the idea that the body's alarm response cannot last for ever, so the panic must eventually ebb. In one 1973 demonstration a girl scared of cars was driven around for hours.

Cherophobia, rooted in a belief that bad things are sure to follow, is an aversion to what?

Happiness makes some people wary in both Western and Eastern cultures, on the theory that misfortune tends to strike the cheerful. Some also believe that showing joy harms those around them.

Which Sling Blade star has described a phobia of antique furniture, particularly ornate French chairs?

Billy Bob Thornton wrote the quirk into Sling Blade for another character, and says American antiques don't trouble him, only big gold-carved French chairs with velvet cushions.

Gelotophobia, which can leave sufferers moving as stiffly as wooden puppets, is the fear of what?

Being laughed at feels so threatening to sufferers that the therapist Michael Titze named their rigid posture 'Pinocchio syndrome'. Researchers have since found the fear on every continent.

Which psychologist, dubbed 'the mother of behavior therapy', cured a three-year-old named Peter of his fear of rabbits?

Mary Cover Jones began with the animal 12 feet away and brought it closer while the boy ate his favourite candy, until it was nibbling his fingers. She published the study in 1924.

Which psychologist's 'preparedness' theory holds that evolution primed humans to learn certain fears with ease?

Martin Seligman traced the pattern to evolutionary history: threats that mattered to our ancestors are easy to instil in the laboratory, while fears of newer dangers are much harder to induce.

Which German psychiatrist coined 'agoraphobia' in 1871 after three male patients panicked in certain areas of town?

Carl Westphal published 'Die Agoraphobie' in a Berlin psychiatric journal, and six years later gave medicine its first clinical description of narcolepsy.

Which physician who signed the Declaration of Independence wrote a satirical 1786 catalogue of 'species of phobia'?

Benjamin Rush is remembered as the 'father of American psychiatry', a title the profession's own association gave him in 1965. His joke essay helped fix the word's sense of a specific morbid fear.

Which US president reportedly had nosocomephobia and resisted going into hospital for a dangerous clot in 1974?

Richard Nixon allegedly warned that if he went in he would never come out again. Nosocomephobia is defined as an excessive fear of hospitals.

In Homer's Iliad, which personification of fear goes into battle alongside his brother Phobos?

Deimos and Phobos were a matched pair, and in 1877 the American astronomer Asaph Hall borrowed both names for two newly discovered moons.

Submechanophobia is the fear of man-made items such as statues, buoys and chains when they are found where?

Underwater shipwrecks, sea mines and even theme-park animatronics can trigger it. The name bolts the Latin 'sub', under, onto the Greek for machine.

Venustraphobia, a word from a humorous 1998 BBC News article, borrows a Roman goddess's name for the fear of whom?

Beautiful women are the supposed trigger, hence the nod to Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty. The term belongs with the jocular coinages rather than the clinical ones.

Which stand-up comedian and future podcast host fronted NBC's dare show Fear Factor from 2001 to 2006?

Joe Rogan presided over three stunts per episode, usually for a $50,000 prize. MTV later revived the show with the rapper Ludacris as host.