How will you communicate your progress?

For a specific phobia, it means that when you are in the presence of the feared object, animal, location etc, you experience intense fear and apprehension. I don't mean you get uncomfortable. I mean you freak the hell out. Another feature of phobias is that you know you are crazy. You know that the amount of fear and discomfort you feel about this thing is in no way proportional to the actual situation. There are different subtypes of phobias. For instance, there is blood and injection phobia, where you pass out every time you visit the Red Cross. There is also social phobia, which is essentially an intense fear of social situations in which you feel like you have to be on stage and be judged by everyone else even though no one really cares wtf you're doing. Repetition can also be a very useful method for creating positive associations to messages. This is because repetition enhances learning, whether through classical conditioning, operant conditioning, or social learning. Classical conditioning occurs when an initially neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus) becomes associated with another stimulus that is inherently pleasant or unpleasant (the unconditioned stimulus). When a message repeatedly pairs an object or a recommendation with an unconditioned stimulus that already triggers a positive response (eg, sex, food, cute babies), the topic of the message will be more likely to trigger that same positive response (Staats & Staats, 1958). In one study demonstrating the influence of classical conditioning on attitudes, Razran (1940) presented participants with slogans such as Workers of the world, unite. These slogans were presented repeatedly while participants were either enjoying a free lunch (an unconditioned positive stimulus), inhaling unpleasant odors (an unconditioned negative stimulus), or in a neutral setting. As you might expect, participants formed more positive attitudes toward the slogans when they were paired with the free lunch and more negative attitudes toward the same slogans when they were paired with unpleasant odors. Interestingly, the participants were not consciously aware of which slogans were associated with the lunch, the odors, or the neutral conditions. This demonstrated that classical conditioning is a very basic way that people learn to associate the content of the persuasive message with positive feelings. Operant conditioning is another form of learning that can be used to link a message with positive feelings. When British doctors in a now-famous empirical study gave patients (who were suffering from minor cold symptoms or mild muscle pain) a firm diagnosis and positive assurances that they'd feel better in a few days, 64 percent of those patients got better. But when patients with the same symptoms were seen by doctors who told them they were uncertain of the diagnosis, and that if the patient still felt ill in a few days they should return to the doctor, only 39 percent said their health had improved.

What we expect can cause negative consequences. Back in 1962, Japanese researchers did an experiment on thirteen boys who were hypersensitive to the leaves of the Japanese lacquer tree. The researchers touched the boys on one arm with leaves from a harmless tree and told them they were from the Japanese lacquer tree. They touched them on the other arm with leaves from the Japanese lacquer tree but told them the leaves were harmless. All thirteen arms that had been touched by the harmless leaves showed a skin reaction. Only two of the arms that were touched by the poisonous tree produced a rash. Even more surprising, the reaction to the harmless leaves was stronger than the reaction to the leaves that were actually poisonous. Simply thinking that one is being touched by a poisonous leaf brought on a rash more often than actually being touched by one. This is sometimes classified as a disorder in its own right (social anxiety disorder), but the main bad stuff that you are going to feel is a sense of overwhelming embarrassment or humiliation in most or all social situations. Next up is obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). I'm just going to throw this out there. The world has no idea what OCD is. Most of what you see on TV or hear people say (oh that's just my OCD) is referring to OCPD, or obsessive compulsive personality disorder. Basically people who are so anal and finicky that it's super annoying. OCD is a bit more serious. As you might guess, the two major components of OCD are obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are disruptive thoughts or images that pop into your head and persist there. These can get really disturbing, like imagining yourself crushing kittens or people you love dying. In this type of learning, people engage in a behavior and, if rewards follow, they are more likely to engage in that behavior again. One recent marketing trend that harnesses operant conditioning is to associate the purchase of a product with philanthropic rewards.

Although these campaigns haven't always been successful, the assumption is that by buying the product, you feel better about yourself, thereby reinforcing the behavior. Some recent examples: Starbucks's Ethos Water Fund: Every bottle purchased leads to a contribution to clean-water programs for children. Pepsi's Refresh Project: Purchases of Pepsi products helped PepsiCo give away millions in grants each month to fund philanthropic projects. KFC's Buckets for a Cure campaign: With every purchase of a pink bucket of fried chicken, KFC donated 50 cents to breast cancer research. Social learning plays a role as well. When people watch a character in a television ad use a product and get rewarded for doing so, the observer vicariously associates the product with a good outcome and will be more likely to use the product herself. For instance, if a commercial depicts a man buying a certain brand of tequila and thereafter a dozen supermodels instantly focus their lustful gaze on him, the implicit message is that buying this brand of tequila produces positive attention. Health professionals sometimes see the same phenomenon happen with patients who fear uncomfortable side effects to a prescription. The capacity of inert substances to bring about pain and other negative responses, simply because we expect them to do so, is called the nocebo effect. So, what does all of this have to do with hope and the environment? Suffering headline stress disorder Think of the environmental stories you've consumed recently. How do they make you feel? What's the impact of being bombarded by the climate crisis, species extinctions, wildfires, plastics pollution, and so many other urgent, global issues? We are exposed to horrifying events more today than at any other time in human history. Twenty-four-hour news cycles, alerts on personal mobile devices, and social media feeds bring incessant predictions of a bleak future. Much of our news consumption now occurs on these digital platforms. They are repetitive in nature and generally cause serious psychological discomfort. Compulsions are what you might be more familiar with.

They are urges to perform very specific or ritualistic acts. A classic example is stepping on every crack (or every 3rd crack) on the sidewalk. These are often linked to the obsessions in a causal way, even though no real cause and effect relationship exists between them. In the previous example, a person with OCD might feel that they MUST step on each crack in the sidewalk otherwise a plane will fall out of the sky and kill everyone inside. Someone else might have to step back and forth 10 times before entering or leaving a house otherwise the home will get robbed. OCD can also exist with only obsessions or only compulsions, but these forms are much less common. The last anxiety disorder that I'm going to talk about is called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). You have probably heard of this one in regards to the military. Cognitive Balance and Positive Associations The learning perspectives we just covered rely on repetition to get the audience to pair an object or a position mentally with another positive stimulus or reward. Fritz Heider's balance theory gives us another way of understanding how messages can link products or positions with positive things effectively, even without repeated exposure. Heider (1946) posited that people have a strong tendency to maintain consistency among their thoughts (an idea that should be familiar after our discussion of cognitive dissonance in article 6). Consider this example: If it is the case that (a) you like your friend, (b) your friend likes ballroom dancing, and (c) you like ballroom dancing, then all these cognitions are consistent. But if you hate ballroom dancing, there would be inconsistency among your thoughts, leading you to wonder about your friend, How could someone so cool like something so lame? To bring your cognitions back in harmony with each other--or to use Heider's term, to restore balance--you might convince yourself ballroom dancing isn't that bad after all. Balance theory A theory which proposes that the motivation to maintain consistency among one's thoughts colors how people form new attitudes and can also drive them to change existing attitudes. This perspective helps to explain why the magazine ad in FIGURE 8. A mobile phone image taken by Alexander Chadwick, a survivor of the 2005 London subway bombings, jump-started what is now the everyday practice of reporting news in part through user-generated content. Our increased exposure to real-time, on-the-ground knowledge of things happening all over the planet can help build connections with people in different circumstances, but it also places us in perpetual, intimate contact with tragedies, which leaves many feeling cynical, desensitized, and ineffectual.

Life has always been stressful and terrible things certainly happen, but personal exposure to horrifying events occurring any place on Earth is a new and disturbing phenomenon. What is also new is our heightened exposure to images and videos captured by ordinary people on their smartphones detailing the devastation of climate change, along with a clear message from our most trusted scientific sources that if we do not act fast, even more dire consequences are coming. The anxiety, exhaustion, and difficulty sleeping many experience in response to the news has become so prevalent in recent years, psychologist Steven Stosny gave it a name: headline stress disorder. It's the state of anxiety and fear people experience in response to an intense deluge of terrible news. Caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of doom and gloom, people experience a range of emotions, including fear, anxiety, anger, and depression. As Steven Pinker puts it, Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will make us think it is. It's a matter of quantity--seven in ten Americans say they feel worn out from too much news, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study--and orientation. As numerous communication studies reveal, almost all of the news that we hear about the environment is bad. Troops in the armed forces are one of the most likely populations to get PTSD and it's a huge problem in the United States right now. Basically PTSD is when you experience or witness some really soded up stuff and it messes up your head. The traumatic event doesn't have to be just combat but it can also include things like natural disasters, physical abuse, or rape. The group of symptoms that come along with PTSD is pretty distinct. If you know someone who has PTSD, you will know exactly what I'm talking about. The person with PTSD is likely going to have some sort of re-experiencing of the traumatic event either in the form of flashbacks or dreams. They deserve to forget, but their douchebrain keeps going, Nope! Time to live it all over again. They are also likely to be on edge and hypervigilant. This means that they are always looking for signs of danger and startle a lot more easily than other people. The ad assumes that you, as the magazine reader, already have a positive attitude toward Jennifer Aniston (hence the plus sign connecting you and Aniston in FIGURE 8. The ad informs you that Aniston is positively inclined toward Smart Water.