Fear and Phobia: A Critical Review and the Rational-Choice Theory of Neurosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reviews the empirical status of theories of fear and phobia. Psychoanalysis received little support, as findings tend to refute its basic assumption that phobia results from repressed material. Although conditioning has its weaknesses, it appears to be the strongest explanation of simple phobia. Findings raise question as to whether interoceptive conditioning can account for the development of panic disorder and agoraphobia, as these disorders develop in the absence of environmental conditioning events. A significant body of research supports Clark’s claim that catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations are involved in both the development and treatment of panic disorder and agoraphobia. However, the causal relationship between the two remains unclear. Likewise, while biological factors certainly increase the vulnerability to developing fear and phobia, findings have not yet confirmed that these behaviors are controlled by biological mechanisms. A new theory, the Rational-Choice Theory of Neurosis (Rofé, 2010; Y. Rofé & Rofé, 2013), which preserves the psychoanalytic claim that bizarre phobias need to be explained within a theory that accounts for neuroses by one set of theoretical concepts, was used to resolve the theoretical confusion in this field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".