Specific phobia is characterized by and excessive and persistent fear triggered by the presence of or anticipated encounter with a specific object or situation. The level of fear is usually excessive or unreasonable relative to the actual danger posed by the object or situation. The avoidance of the feared situation or the distress experienced in the feared situation also interferes significantly with normal functioning and produces marked distress. There are five subtypes of specific phobias that include:

• Animal subtype (snakes or spiders)
• Natural Environment subtype (heights or water)
• Blood injection injury subtype
• Situational subtype (airplanes or elevators)
• Atypical subtype (choking or vomiting)

Treatment of Specific Phobias:

Behavior Therapy: The behavior therapy most commonly used in the treatment of specific phobias involves controlled exposure to the stimuli or situations that elicit phobic fear. Here the patients are gradually placed — symbolically or increasingly under real life conditions in those situations they find most frightening. In the original variant known as systematic desensitization, patients are first trained in the techniques of deep muscle relaxation and asked to develop a hierarchy of situations they fear, ranging at the bottom from only mildly anxiety provoking to the top at maximally fear provoking. Then, while remaining in a state of relaxation, they are asked to imagine their fear producing situations, starting with those lowest in the hierarchy and gradually moving up the hierarchy as the fear of the scenes lower in the hierarchy extinguishes.

Graded exposure to fear producing stimuli: Other more efficient forms of treatment involve graded exposure to fear producing stimuli and do not rely on the use of relaxation or imaginable exposure. Instead, patients are encouraged to expose themselves either with the aid of a therapist or friend to their actual feared situations for long periods of time that their fear begins to subside. It is often found that a variant on this procedure known as participant modeling is even more effective than exposure alone. With participant modeling, the therapist models ways of interacting with the phobic stimulus or situation in calm and non-fearful ways. All of these techniques enable the patient to learn that these situations are not as frightening as they had thought and that their anxiety, although unpleasant is not harmful and will gradually dissipate.