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The fear of kissing is philomophobia. The fear of being stared at, whether it's with amorous
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intentions or not, is scopophobia. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy. I suffer from arachnophobia
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the fear of spiders, and acrophobia, the fear of heights. And this is The List Show
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Today, I'm sharing a bunch of common, and some not-so-common, phobias, from thalassophobia to agoraphobia, the latter of which is not, as I once thought
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simply the fear of leaving one's own home. Let's get started. The DSM-5 doesn't attempt to comprehensively list every single phobia that's out there
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so it's a bit difficult to say exactly what is and isn't a widely recognized phobia
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And if you've never heard of the DSM-5, it's just the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and
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Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a standard resource in defining and categorizing
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mental health issues. You won't find gulatophobia, or the fear of being laughed at, on Merriam-Webster.com
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or the Oxford English Dictionary, for example. But it certainly seems to be a recognizable fear
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And you can read about it on BBC.com and in a piece from McGill University written by
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the director of their Office for Science and Society, Joe Schwartz. In this video, we're sticking to phobias we could find in multiple sources, but it's
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fair to assume that some are much more common than others. The DSM-5 lists five categories of what it calls specific phobias
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One category is animal types, including arachnophobia, which I've already mentioned, and the fear
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of insects, known as entomophobia. It also alludes to the fear of dogs, often called scinophobia
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The DSM doesn't specifically mention equinophobia, the fear of horses, or ilorophobia, the fear
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of cats, though they would also fall under the animal types category
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On a related note, we have dorophobia, what Merriam-Webster.com describes as a dread of
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touching the skin or fur of an animal The second type of fear the DSM lists is natural environment type That basically what it sounds like and would include something like the fear of water
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Hydrophobia sounds like the same thing, and it sort of is, though the word is generally
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used today in regards to a symptom of the rabies virus. If you're afraid of very deep water in particular, you suffer from thalassophobia, which can
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also be defined as the fear of the ocean. And if you or your four-legged friend hates thunderstorms, one of you may suffer from astrophobia
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which is associated with the fear of thunder and lightning. Your pup might also have a case of zygrophobia
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the fear of vacuum cleaners. Ergophobia is the fear of work, or maybe just an aversion to someone telling you
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you've got a case of the Mondays. The DSM-5's next category of phobia
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blood injection injury type, is pretty self-explanatory. The fear of blood is hemophobia
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The fear of needles or injections is trypanophobia. A survey conducted in the UK indicated
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that people with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy were roughly twice as likely to suffer
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from a fear of needles as non-hesitant individuals. The situational type of phobia includes fears that can pop up in specific parts of life
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like flying in an airplane, aerophobia, or elevators, which the DSM-5 does allude to
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though the only word we could find to describe that condition is elevatophobia, which seems
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pretty unofficial. Claustrophobia, which may include the fear of elevators as a subset, would be a situational
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type of phobia. I thought of agoraphobia as claustrophobia's opposite—basically the fear of leaving one's house
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quite right. The UK's National Health Service website defines it as a fear of being in situations
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where escape might be difficult, or that help wouldn't be available if things go wrong. That
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can include open spaces, public transportation, and even, according to the Mayo Clinic's website
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enclosed spaces. The DSM's last category of phobias is the rather broad, other type. Under
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that umbrella it mentions the fear of choking which is apparently a rare phobia It been called pseudodysphagia and metaphobia is the fear of vomiting The DSM also mentions the fear of costumed characters in its other section One word for that masclophobia does not
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appear in most standard reference texts, as far as we could see, but it does seem to describe a
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very real fear, often experienced by children. An article on LiveScience.com claims that about
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1 percent of children suffer from a fear of costumed characters. The New York Times published
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a piece in April 2020 about maskophobia—often used as a synonym—specifically in the context
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of the less fanciful masks worn during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another fear that's fairly common amongst kids is globophobia—the fear of balloons
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or more specifically, the fear of those balloons popping. Blenophobia also doesn't appear in most
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dictionaries, but a number of less authoritative sources have described it as the irrational fear
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of slime. Apparently anything from mucus to fish can set off a person's blenophobia
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Some fears are truly difficult to avoid. Anemophobia is the fear of air
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That can manifest itself as a fear of the wind or giraffes. Barophobia is the fear of gravity, perhaps because sufferers believe it will cause them
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to fall or because they believe something will fall on them. Peter Pan may have had a case of Jurassicophobia, the fear of growing up or aging
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Aging may be tough, but as a wise person once told me, it definitely beats the alternative
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The fear of Greek terms or complex scientific terminology is Helenologophobia. I'm not sure what the fear of irony is called. Logophobia is the fear of words. On a possibly
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related note, we have glossophobia—the fear of public speaking. That's often referred to as the
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most common fear. That's hard to say definitively, but glossophobia definitely does seem to afflict
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a large portion of the populace. The OED has two very different definitions for scotophobia—one
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with a capital S and one with a lowercase s Big S scotophobia is defined as intensive version or hostility towards Scotland its people or its culture Sounds a lot like a specific brand of xenophobia
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The other type of scotophobia is less objectionable, the fear or dislike of the dark
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Are you afraid of the dark? Shout out to SNCC. If so, you could say you have nyctophobia or
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ocluophobia, two words that have been used for that fear. On the flip side is photophobia
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which the OED defines as aversion to or avoidance of bright light. That might not be a fear per se
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as we typically think of it. It's associated with neurological diseases and eye issues that
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can make light painful or uncomfortable. Ablutophobia is the fear of bathing or washing
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Nossophobia is the fear of disease. If you suffer from trypophobia, you'll want to skip
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the next 10 seconds of this video. That word refers to a fear of things that look like this
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featuring holes in some kind of repeating pattern. There doesn't seem to be a single
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conclusion in the scientific community as to why some people have such a strong aversion
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to these types of images. Two researchers at the Center for Brain Science at the University
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of Essex speculated that it could be related to a similarity between hole-filled images
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and the appearance of certain dangerous animals. The thinking goes that people are basically
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transposing irrational fear onto an irrational situation. When you hear that people are afraid of gravity or slime, you might be tempted to chuckle
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I mean, the prospect of being mortified of the bath practically calls out for jokes about
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ex-boyfriends with questionable grooming habits. But even the more unusual phobias on this list presumably cause real harm to the people
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who suffer from them. Many people who have phobias know perfectly well that their fear is irrational, but that
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doesn't mean they can just flip a switch to put an end to them. The human brain can be fascinating, but it shouldn't be a source of ridicule
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Except for people with scotophobia, I guess. Take it easy on the Scots
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Do you have a phobia you think we should know about? If so, drop it in the comments below
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Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time
