My classmate when I was in college doing my BSc Mr. Rathod called me the other day and said Dr. Surya Rao you knew that I had two daughters. The eldest is in MSc Mathematics and the younger one is studying B.A. I am worried to say that my eldest daughter very often develops difficulty breathing, sweating, and trembles. The entire family is in distress to see her in that panic situation several times. When I am not at home, if her mother is alone then the moment my daughter develops tremors and swatting my wife is getting semi-conscious or un-conscious and people around our flat flow into my house extending sympathy on my daughter.
We have shown to several family physicians but the condition is not improved. Dr. Rao please advise me or refer my daughter to a specialist as you have experience of decades in extending quality Medicare to lakhs of people therefore, please show me a way.
On hearing Mr. Rathod’s daughter’s case, I rushed to his house as he was in our nearby colony. I thoroughly examined and investigated the reasons by a meticulous history of the illness exclusively sitting with the daughter and also jointly with the parents. Their family is known to me for the last 30 years so I could talk to them with comfort. Though it looks pointless to some people in this case cockroach is the sole cause for recurrent horror outbreaks.
What is this condition? This girl looking at cockroaches accidentally or incidentally or by casual gets sudden fear shivering and at times lose consciousness. This cockroach phobia, also known as katsarida phobia, is an intense and irrational fear of cockroaches. It can have a significant impact on a person’s daily life.
Symptoms
Fear when seeing, hearing, or thinking about cockroaches, anxiety attacks, including difficulty breathing, sweating, tremors, and tachycardia, avoidance of places where cockroaches might be found, and Persistent thoughts about cockroaches are some of the symptoms.
According to research published recently in Behav Res Methods. 2021 April provided by Springer Nature, Cockroach phobia is a highly prevalent disorder in several parts of the world, especially in cities where these animals are common, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mediterranean zones (Bueno-Marí et al., 2013). We believe that cockroach phobia could be relevant in the phobic research field due to the lack of knowledge about the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms involved in its etiology and maintenance, in comparison with other widely studied animal phobias (Öhman, 1993; Öhman & Mineka, 2001). Cognitive dysfunction is a condition that impairs a person’s ability to think, learn, remember, and make decisions. It can affect a person’s attention, memory, and problem-solving skills. In this regard, an increasing number of studies are focusing on cockroach phobia treatments to develop new, more accepted treatments as potential alternatives to applying the exposure technique supported in virtual reality or augmented reality (e.g., Botella et al., 2005; Botella et al., 2008; Botella et al., 2010) From the neurocognitive research field, there is also recent empirical evidence from an fMRI study focused on the neural processes involved in cockroach phobia (Rivero et al.,2017). A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study is a brain scan that measures blood flow changes in the brain to determine which areas are active.
Due to the growing interest in this field, this study aimed to develop and validate a set of animal images that includes pictures of cockroaches, which are not included (or insufficiently represented) in other image databases. Following previous research (i.e., Kurdi et al., 2017), we used the circumplex model of effect (Posner, Russell, & Peterson, 2005) to conceptualize the affective responses and their measurement. Thus, the images were assessed on two subjective scales: (I) valence, referring to the degree of negativity or positivity of the image; and (ii) arousal, referring to the level of emotional excitement the image evokes. Considering prior findings in this field, our first hypothesis was that cockroach scenes would be at least as unpleasant as snake and spider pictures, leading to more negative valence ratings and higher levels of arousal. Second, based on previous studies of affective ratings (Lang & Bradley, 2007), we expected to find gender differences, especially for unpleasant images, in that women would rate cockroach, snake, and spider scenes as more unpleasant and arousing, whereas cat images would be rated as more pleasant in comparison with men. Similar ratings by males and females were expected for butterfly pictures.
Current Research:
Research on emotional processes has been closely related to the use of emotional stimuli, promoting the development of different standardized sets of images. However, some kinds of images that would be relevant in clinical psychology research are not available, especially for small animal phobias. The present study aims to validate a set of animal images that includes images of cockroaches, which are not present in the current sets of images. Two hundred and forty images depicting five types of animals (cockroaches, spiders, snakes, cats, and butterflies) were collected from online public domains. Four hundred and twenty-four participants (72.9% women) took part in the study rating the images in two affective dimensions (i.e., valence chemistry in the brain and arousal). Cockroach pictures were rated as significantly more unpleasant than pictures of spiders, snakes, butterflies, and cats. Moreover, results revealed that women rated cockroach, spider, and snake pictures as more negative than men did. Also, women in comparison with men rated cockroach images as more arousing. The results highlight the importance of using images of cockroaches, due to their high negative valence, which even exceeds that of snakes and spiders, the unpleasant animals typically used in phobic research. This set of images can be useful in research on small-animal phobias. Causes for Cockroach phobia and other related phobias and treatment will be discussed in the coming issue (To be concluded).