Social & Interpersonal · 55 entries
Social Phobias and Fear of Other People
Fears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them. This is the largest group on the site, and social anxiety disorder is the entry that defines it. It is defined by a fear of evaluation, and the definition includes favourable evaluation as well as unfavourable, which separates it from shyness better than any measure of severity does.
It is also where the terms that are not fears at all end up. The ethnic, religious and political coinages borrow the suffix to name a prejudice rather than an anxiety, and calling one of them a disorder is a category error that flatters the prejudice by moving it from the person holding it to a condition they suffer from. Every one of those entries exists to say so. The filing rule is the object: if the fear is of a person, an audience or a relationship it belongs here, and a fear of a crowded room as a room files with places and situations instead.
In this category
All 55 social phobias and fear of other people
55 entries
- AcephobiaTwo studies found asexual people rated as less human than other orientations, and a built-in control for unfamiliarity failed to explain the result.
- AnglophobiaA Glasgow study measured Anglophobia and Islamophobia side by side and found the same predictors. The object of the prejudice was close to interchangeable.
- BiphobiaIts commonest form is not hostility but denial that the category exists. Its synonym, monosexism, names the belief rather than the feeling and fits better.
- Fear of AbandonmentFeeling rejected activates the brain's physical pain centres and leaves an imprint in its warning system. Most people who experience it meet no diagnostic criteria.
- Fear of Bad BreathHalitophobia is the belief that you have bad breath when nobody else can smell it. Estimates of its share of the complaint run from five to seventy-two per cent.
- Fear of BeardsAttested in 1851 of Jesuits reacting to a beard's politics. What is read is the decision to grow one, not the hair, and Watson conditioned it in a boy in the 1920s.
- Fear of Beautiful WomenThe word survives as a single sentence inside an article about gynophobia, and that sentence is the whole of what anyone has written about it.
- Fear of Being AloneThe source has to deny both readings because people reach both. It names a fear of being alone, and people with it suffer in company as well as in solitude.
- Fear of Being Laughed AtTitze noticed patients who moved like wooden puppets when they thought they were being laughed at. They also cannot tell friendly teasing from ridicule.
- Fear of Being PhotographedNo Greek word was ever built for this fear. English carries an adjective, camera-shy, and the material behind it describes shyness rather than cameras.
- Fear of Being Stared AtA psychiatric journal described it in 1906 better than most sources since. It is classed as both a social and a specific phobia, and has never been counted on its own.
- Fear of BlushingCrozier showed a blush works because it cannot be controlled, so the fear targets the response that is doing the person good. Surgery for it has a regret rate.
- Fear of BurglarsScelerophobia is the fear of burglars and of people who mean harm. It names the intruder rather than the crime, and the record behind it is one reference entry.
- Fear of ChildrenA management professor said a critical mass of younger persons produces an explosive increase in crime, and the climate of fear followed from there.
- Fear of CommitmentAvoidance of commitment rises as the quality of non-commitment rises, which is what a comparison looks like rather than what a fear looks like.
- Fear of Foreign LanguagesSituation-specific, so it affects people calm everywhere else. Speaking a language well means briefly becoming somebody slightly different, which is the difficulty.
- Fear of IntimacyThe existential reading in the literature: loving and being loved raises the value of a life and sharpens the fact that it ends. And what the scale measures.
- Fear of MenThe fear of women is an inclusion term in ICD-11 and the fear of men is a dictionary line, though the wordbooks present the two as a pair.
- Fear of Offending OthersThe same avoidance as social phobia running in the opposite direction. The fear is of offending others, and the person withdraws in order to spare them.
- Fear of Old PeopleThe medieval view was favourable. The turn came around the Anglo-Saxon period and the literature has been getting harsher ever since.
- Fear of Other People's OpinionsEvery site defines it as fearing what others think. The encyclopedia adds a second object nobody quotes: fearing the opinions you hold yourself.
- Fear of People in Masks and CostumesIt arrives before the age of eight, and children only begin developing facial recognition at about six and reach adult skill at fourteen.
- Fear of Public SpeakingNo coiner, no date of first use and no population survey. One study of university students, and a treatment literature that now runs through a headset.
- Fear of RelativesSyngenesophobia gets four words in the reference books and three citations, all of them lists of odd phobias. Its longest text is a fan fiction.
- Fear of SexIt names one end of a measured personality dimension, and where a person scores predicts their sexual knowledge, their openness and their condom use.
- Fear of Sexual AbuseThe reference entry locates the fear in the person at risk. The version with any documented presence is a parent's, and it produces screening rather than avoidance.
- Fear of Sexual IntercourseThe Greek root means offspring and the Latin root means the act itself, and what people actually describe is usually neither of those two things.
- Fear of StrangersStranger anxiety runs to a timetable, peaks before a child's first birthday, and is graded by the stranger's height, sex and distance.
- Fear of Taking TestsHighly test-anxious students score twelve percentile points below their peers, and the literature is clear it is not about preparation or intellect.
- Fear of TeenagersSociology studies it, not psychiatry. Before the 1940s the word teenager was missing from headlines, and Columbine had cameras running and police inside.
- Fear of the Opposite SexFour words in one reference work and a fear that states can hold in the other. Its measured effect is on what a patient will say once the doctor uses a euphemism.
- Fear of TyrantsThe United States has never had a dictatorship, and two legal scholars argue the fear of one has blocked reforms the country needed.
- Fear of UglinessLess a fear than a documented prejudice, and one that several jurisdictions have now decided to prohibit as a form of discrimination outright.
- Fear of Undressing in Front of SomeoneOnly Abrahamic societies among ancient civilisations tied nakedness to sexual shame. Elsewhere the embarrassment was about poverty, and Japan and Finland kept the baths.
- Fear of WomenAttested from 1886 and rising in frequency in every decade since. ICD-11 lists it as an inclusion term under social anxiety disorder, which almost nothing here has.
- Fear of Writing in PublicCash bought in advance, deposit slips filled in at home, money handed to somebody else. The fear is of the hand shaking, and the anxiety makes it shake.
- GermanophobiaMade in Germany began in 1887 as a warning label. Berlin, Ontario became Kitchener in 1916. Germanophobia left most of its record on maps.
- HibernophobiaA papal bull of 1155 called the Irish rude and barbarous, and Gerald of Wales called them lazy. Both descriptions stayed in print for centuries.
- HomophobiaGeorge Weinberg's word moved the diagnosis from the gay person to the one hating them, a year before the manual changed. Its 1969 debut meant the near-reverse.
- IndophobiaThomas Trautmann traced Indophobia to a deliberate evangelical and utilitarian campaign that displaced an earlier British enthusiasm for India.
- IslamophobiaA word that copies homophobia, which may copy hydrophobia, the old name for rabies. Three coinages deep, and nobody checked what the suffix was doing.
- JapanophobiaIn 1939, 87.7 per cent of Japanese Brazilians read Japanese newspapers. In 1942 the newspapers, the schools and the radios were all taken away.
- JudeophobiaA physician coined it in 1882, called it a hereditary and incurable psychic disorder, and concluded from the diagnosis that arguing against it was pointless.
- LesbophobiaThe word dates to 1972. At least 38 jurisdictions criminalise sex between women explicitly, and corrective rape was named after a killing in 2008.
- RomaphobiaAntiziganism is built on a root meaning untouchable, and the commonest English word comes from a mistake about Egypt. The vocabulary records the prejudice.
- RussophobiaThe Westminster Review called it an epidemic disease in 1836. Tyutchev coined the Russian form in 1867 and aimed it at Russian liberals, not foreigners.
- Selective MutismUntil 1994 it was elective mutism, and the older name accused the person of choosing. The current one is still disputed for implying the same thing.
- Separation Anxiety DisorderAround three quarters of children with the disorder refuse school, and up to eighty per cent of school refusers meet its criteria. The overlap runs both ways.
- Shy Bladder SyndromeSix American state prison systems have amended their drug testing rules for it, and UK probation guidance has accepted it since 2005. No test can confirm it.
- Shy Bowel SyndromeA study of 714 students put avoidance at 14.4 per cent. No manual carries the condition, and the therapy everyone recommends has no trial behind it.
- SinophobiaSinophobia produced the first US immigration law aimed at one nationality, in 1882. Its later record is legislation, polling and assault, not sentiment.
- Social Anxiety DisorderThe definition covers positive evaluation as well as negative, which separates it from shyness. Attention to the diagnosis rose from 1999, when drugs arrived.
- Stage FrightIt can start thirty-six hours before the performance. Propranolol takes away the shaking and the racing heart and leaves the nervousness exactly where it was.
- TransphobiaIts own reference article says it is not a clinical phobia. The best predictor of the attitude turns out to be a different prejudice entirely.
- XenophobiaThe encyclopedia of phobias gives it three words. The working definition is about group boundaries, and one sociologist counts admiration as the same act.
Keep going
The other categories
- The Body, Illness & DeathDeath, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself.
- Abstract & ExistentialFailure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
- Animals & CreaturesThe largest group in the catalogue and the oldest.
Common questions
Questions about social phobias and fear of other people
What is the difference between shyness and social anxiety disorder?
The object, not the degree. Social anxiety disorder is defined by a fear of being evaluated, and the definition covers favourable evaluation as well as unfavourable, which is the detail that separates the two better than severity does. Social anxiety disorder is named in both diagnostic manuals; shyness is not a diagnosis anywhere.
Is fear of public speaking a phobia?
Glossophobia is real and widely reported, but it is recognised as social anxiety disorder rather than as a specific phobia of its own. That is the commonest mistake the popular lists make about it, and the entry sets out where the two diagnoses actually divide.
Is xenophobia or homophobia a phobia?
Neither is a fear in any clinical sense. Xenophobia names a political position about who has a claim on the state. George Weinberg coined homophobia in the 1960s and published it in 1972, a year before the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and the word moved the diagnosis rather than naming a phobia.
What is the fear of being watched called?
Scopophobia, the fear of being stared at, and erythrophobia, the fear of blushing, which is often described as a marker of social anxiety disorder rather than as a condition of its own because it sits at the centre of the presenting problem for a large share of it.