title: On nonassociative fear emergence.
abstract: Poulton and Menzies have articulated a nonassociative alternative to traditional conditioning theories of phobia emergence. Prompted by their essay, I address several issues including controversies about what counts as a conditioning event, difficulties establishing whether a fear functioned as an adaptation throughout evolutionary history, hazards of attempting to recover conditioning events in the histories of patients, and problems with the contingency view of associative learning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. rjm@wjh.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Richard J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: McNally
mesh_terms: D003213:Conditioning, Psychological; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D011582:Psychological Theory