Share Alamy images with your team and customers. Current lightbox. Live chat. Narrow your search:. Cut Outs. Page 1 of 2. Next page. Recent searches:. Create a new lightbox Save. Create a lightbox Your Lightboxes will appear here when you have created some. Save to lightbox. Scared cat clawed at the back of the girl Pretty cat goes on a summer trip. Or maybe you used to enjoy cats before you had a bad experience.
Exposure therapy is considered to be one of the most effective treatments for phobias. To address ailurophobia, you might begin by looking at pictures of cats. You might move on to watching cat videos, then holding a stuffed or toy cat. Eventually, you might sit next to a cat in a carrier before taking the final step of holding a gentle cat. Systematic desensitization is a specific type of exposure therapy that involves learning relaxation techniques to help manage feelings of fear and anxiety during exposure therapy.
Eventually, these exercises can also help teach you to associate cats with a relaxation response instead of a stress response. These include:. Animal phobias are among the most common phobias. Learn more about pantophobia, a condition that describes a fear of everything, including its symptoms, how it's diagnosed, and how it can be treated.
A specific phobia is an intense fear of an animal, object, or situation. Insect-related phobias, such fear of bees melissophobia , are common. Trichophobia is a fear of hair.
We'll tell you more about this phobia, including what can trigger it and what kinds of symptoms you might experience…. When the American psychologist G Stanley Hall published his Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear in the American Journal of Psychology in he identified no less than different forms of pathological fear, all with their own Greek or Latinate names. These stretched from the more general categories of agoraphobia and claustrophobia or haptophobia fear of touch , to very specific forms such as amakaphobia fear of carriages , pteronophobia fear of feathers , and what appears a very Victorian, moral category, hypegiaphobia fear of responsibility.
There was also, of course, ailurophobia: the fear of cats. This urge to classify created a vivid cultural and psychological map of the fears and anxieties of a society that had experienced the rapid social changes of industrialisation and the decline of religion in the post-Darwinian era. Society was turning inwards, and to the sciences of the mind, for answers. Many of the answers were from school children.
The answers make fascinating reading, although Hall, infuriatingly, only gives us snippets. A boy of ten was more resourceful and decided to meet his fears head on. One common therapy is gradual exposure to cats.
For example, they would first practice looking at pictures of cats, then watching videos and movies with cats, touching cat-like material, playing with a toy cat, and finally holding the real thing.
These steps should be taken in controlled, comfortable settings with lots of support, both from the therapist and family members or friends. Throughout this process, relaxation and visualization techniques are often used. They also help reframe the person's mindset and methodically rationalize their fear.
In some cases, hypnotherapy may also be useful. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Armfield JM. Understanding animal fears: a comparison of the cognitive vulnerability and harm-looming models. BMC Psychiatry. Watts A.
Why do we develop certain irrational phobias? SA Mind. Associative learning in flying phobia. J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. The Treatment of Panic Disorder and Phobias. Treatment of specific phobia in adults.
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