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Acrophobia, also known as hypsophobia, is an extreme or irrational fear or phobia of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up. It belongs to a category of specific phobias, called space and motion discomfort, that share similar causes and options for treatment.
The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (from Greek φόβος phobos, "fear") occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, abnormal, unwarranted, persistent, or disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g. agoraphobia), in chemistry to describe chemical aversions (e.g. hydrophobic), in biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g ...
The fear of falling encompasses the anxieties accompanying the sensation and the possibly dangerous effects of falling, as opposed to the heights themselves. Those who have little fear of falling may be said to have a head for heights. Basophobia is sometimes associated with astasia-abasia, the fear of walking/standing erect.
"Many, if not most, people experience some anxiety or discomfort with spiders, heights, confined spaces," one psychologist says.
As with other phobias, psychologists believe trypophobia may have evolutionary origins. "There's some thought that these things come from some evolutionary fears, like fear of heights is real ...
The fear overlaps with acrophobia (the fear of heights) as gephyrophobia tends to be exacerbated in taller bridges as compared to those closer to the water or ground beneath. Dr. Michael Liebowitz , founder of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute , says, "It's not an isolated phobia, but usually part of a ...
Fear of roller coasters, also known as veloxrotaphobia, is the extreme fear of roller coasters.It can also be informally referred to as coaster-phobia. [1]Such a fear is thought to originate from one or more of three factors: childhood trauma, fear of heights, and parental fears that “rub off” on their children. [2]
Since the release of a horrifying video of a mother's last moments before she fell victim of an elevator accident in China, people have been developing a real phobia of these moving stairs.