Fears target specific objects, so unrelated phobias need not correlate with each other

Evidence

Fear is embodied in many forms, and Islamophobia should fall into the “social” fear category, whereas FH and FS would fall under “nature” and “animal” fears, respectively, using Ohman’s (2009) classification for fear. Because the emotion of fear is directed toward a specific target (Kalat & Shiota, 2007), fears were not expected to correlate with each other. Therefore, we expected measures of FH and FS to be uncorrelated with the IS. — Sherman A. Lee, Chelsea A. Reid, Stephen D. Short, Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Ruth Yeh, and Matthew L. Campbell, Fear of Muslims, 88

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives Ohman’s (2009) taxonomy of fear into social, nature, and animal categories, useful for classifying phobias.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘complaints about immodesty’ essay’s theme of categorizing culturally-loaded social anxieties apart from instinctual fears.