Age Jeanette M. Bruce and William C. Sanderson, in their book Specific Phobias, concluded that the age of onset for animal phobias is usually early childhood, between the ages of five and nine. A study done in South Africa by Drs. Willem A. Hoffmann and Lourens H. Human further confirms this conclusion for patients suffering from<unk>  and additionally found dog phobia developing as late as age 20. Gender Bruce and Sanderson also state that animal phobias are more common in females than males. Furthermore, B.K. Wiederhold, a psychiatrist investigating virtual reality therapy as a possible method of therapy for anxiety disorders, goes on to provide data that although prevalent in both men and women, 75% to 90% of patients reporting specific phobias of the animal subtype are women. Acquisition A current theory for fear acquisition presented by S. Rachman in 1977 maintains that there are three conditions by which fear is developed. These include direct personal experience, observational experience, and informational or instructional experience. For example, direct personal experience consists of having a personal negative encounter with a dog such as being bitten. In contrast, seeing a friend attacked by a dog and thus developing a fear of dogs would be observational experience. Whereas both of these types of experiences involves a live dog, informational or instructional experience simply includes being told directly or indirectly (i.e., information read in a book, film, parental cues such as avoidance or dislike, etc.) that dogs are to be feared. A study was conducted at the State University of New York to distinguish the significance of these three conditions upon the development of<unk> . Thirty-seven women ages 18 to 21 were first screened into two groups: fearful of dogs and non-fearful of dogs. Next, each woman was given a questionnaire which asked if she had ever had a frightening and/or painful confrontation with a dog, what her expectation was upon encountering a dog (pain, fear, etc.), and subjectively, what was the probability of that expectation actually occurring. The results indicated that, while non-fearful subjects had a different expectation of what would happen when encountering a dog, painful experiences with dogs were common among both groups; therefore, the study concluded that other factors must affect whether or not these painful experiences will develop into dog phobia. Although Rachman's theory is the accepted model of fear acquisition, cases of<unk>  have been cited in which none of these three causes apply to the patient. In a speech given at the 25th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Arne Öhman proposed that animal fears in particular are likely to be an evolutionary remnant of the necessity "to escape and to avoid becoming the prey of predators". Furthermore, in his book Overcoming Animal/Insect Phobias, Martin Antony suggests that in the absence of Rachman's three causes, providing that the patient's memory is sound, biological factors may be a fourth cause of fear acquisition—meaning that the fear is inherited or is a throwback to an earlier genetic defense mechanism. In any case, these causes may in actuality be a generalization of a complicated blend of both learning and genetics.
Cynophobia
Tokophobia
Phagophobia
Phonophobia
Nosophobia
Thermophobia
Arachnophobia
Mysophobia