Author: npm5390

Lecture 18 teaches us that a phobia is a persistent and irrational fear towards an object or situation that disrupts behavior. We learn that some people have social phobias and many random things. Many of you may know that triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13, but do you know what emetophobia is? It is the fear of vomiting. Now you’re probably thinking no one likes vomiting, but it is much more than a dislike towards it.

I suffer from emetophobia and it is very debilitating. It started in 3rd grade. I woke up on the morning of the last day of the PSSAs, a standardized test for PA elementary and middle school students for the non PA people. I felt horrible, but the test is super mandatory so I went to school. Breakfast was served to keep our minds sharp for the test. I had Cinnamon Toast Crunch. As I finished the math section of the test, I suddenly felt worse. I couldn’t breathe and I kept burping. Then it happened. I threw up on my desk.

Since then, I am horrified of the idea of vomiting. This includes coughing too hard, getting the stomach bug, food poisoning, motion sickness and anything else. I sometimes will stay with a relative if someone in my house is remotely ill or mentions being sick in any way. I won’t hang out with friends for a week after they have been sick. I compulsively check expiration dates on anything with dairy to avoid food poisoning. I make my mom check my chicken twice to make sure it is fully cooked whether its at home or out to eat. At one point, I stopped eating all meat because I was so worried about salmonella. I still won’t eat salad since the lettuce incident with E. coli.

For years I had a taste aversion to Cinnamon Toast Crunch because it was the last thing I ate before I threw up. I know it was not food poisoning from the milk or the cereal but the thought still crosses my mind.

This phobia has very much affected my normal behavior and caused me to be a bit weird around, well, everyone. It caused me to be diagnosed with anxiety, but I have gotten a hold on it. Emetophobia still affects my life. I may not enjoy the compulsiveness, but I have not thrown up in 10 years so I think that is a bonus.

During Lecture 10 we talked about the retrieval of memory and how it can be affected. I found this very relatable to when I think about my favorite songs. I think the song lyrics are like retrieval cues. When I hear a certain song, I can remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard it. This only happens with songs that have a lot of meaning to me. The memories are semantically encoded and therefor easier to recall. I can see myself driving down the back roads close to my house blaring “All Too Well” by Taylor Swift. The memory is even more clear if I am in the same mood as I was when I listened to the song the first time. This is because of mood dependent memory and memory congruence. If I am listening to an emotional song, I start to remember the last time I heard the song and how emotional I felt then. If I am driving on a back road, encoding specificity allows me to remember which part in the song I was at when I was last there.

Occasionally I will forget lyrics to songs I have heard at least 100 times. I get confused because I love the songs so much, but the words are just lost to me. I will start to sing a song from when I was 15, but another song’s lyrics pop into my head and I start to blur the two songs together. This is due to retroactive interference. New music starts to interfere with my memory of old music. I will sometimes not pick up on the fact that I am singing the complete wrong lyrics if the song is not playing. Then for the next week I will have the tune stuck in my head, but I will be rehearsing the wrong lines. The habit of me doing this can cause rehearsal failure. Next time I hear the song, I will start to sing what I think are the words until I find out that my memories were never real of the song.

Illusory correlation is when a person finds connection, or correlation between two random events that share no actual correlation. This could be thinking you got an A on your exam because you wore green that day. People enjoy finding order in the chaos.

My friends and I were talking last week about weird phobias. I have one friend afraid of thunderstorms, and another afraid of toes. I then said that I am afraid to throw up. This sparked a conversation that relates to psychology. We all talked about certain foods that we cannot eat anymore because we associate eating them with being sick or throwing up. My one friend cannot eat ice cream anymore because she thinks eating it causes vomiting. I cannot have Nutterbutter’s. We all consider these foods to cause or be a precursor to becoming sick.

We also learned in class that correlation does not mean causation. I am not allergic to peanuts, chocolate, or wafers. This mean there was no way that a Nutterbutter caused my illness. I probably caught a disease and happened to eat that beforehand.

After talking about weird illusory correlations, my other friend explained how she is certain that the Steeler’s win because she wears the same socks every time they win. She explained how she also thinks that because she sleeps on her left side, she will get an A on her tests the next day. She insists this is the only reason that she does well on exams.

We all try to find the correlation between things to explain the  chaos in our lives. It is comforting to think that as long as we avoid chocolatey snacks or cold creamy desserts we won’t get sick anymore. It is nice to think that we helped our favorite team win because of our socks.