Pediophobia, also known as the fear of dolls, is a relatively common kind of phobia. It is an anxiety disorder that can be associated with a range of dolls from old-fashioned china dolls and porcelain dolls to dolls that talk and move. Pediophobia, is considered a branch of automatonophobia

Automatonophobia

- Automatonophobia : Automatonophobia is the fear of anything that falsely represents a sentient being. This includes, but is not limited to, ventriloquist dummies, animatronic creatures, and wax statues. This fear can manifest itself in numerous ways; every individual who suffers from the fear...

, or a fear of humanoid figures.

Causes of Pediophobia

There are many theories connected to the possibility of how pediophobia is caused. Some of these reasons include external events, heredity, as well as psychological tendencies and brain chemistry. The most common reason given however would be that a traumatic experience in the past that associates dolls to fear and anxiety in a person.

Psychological Theories

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

 claimed that children fantasize about dolls coming to life. Psychologist

Psychologist

Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...

 Ernst Jentsch

Ernst Jentsch

Ernst Jentsch was born in 1867. He is a German psychiatrist and the author of On the Psychology of the Uncanny . "Reference has often been made to Jentsch’s essay on the uncanny, in the vast secondary literature of psychoanalysis after Freud, as if its content were already known, familiar and thus...

 theorized that uncomfortable or uncanny feelings arise when there is an intellectual uncertainty about whether an object is alive or not, and also when an object that one knows to be inanimate resembles a living being enough to generate confusion about its nature. Japanese roboticist

Roboticist

A roboticist designs, builds, programs, and experiments with robots. Since robotics is a highly interdisciplinary field, roboticists often have backgrounds in a number of disciplines including computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer engineering...

 Masahiro Mori

Masahiro Mori

is a Japanese roboticist noted for his pioneering work on the emotional response of humans to non-human entities, as well as for his views on religion and robots. The ASIMO robot was designed by one of Masahiro's students....

 expanded on Freud and Jentsch's theories to develop the "uncanny valley" hypothesis.

Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley

Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers...

 is a fundamental portion in the theory of why humans fear non-living objects such as dolls. The theory explains that as an object, such as a robot, moves towards becoming more familiar in human likeness from its functionality, it slowly becomes more popular because of familiarization to the object from the standpoint of a person. However there is a huge gap from this point to a regular healthy human and that is the uncanny valley. This span of space is where things which lose their similarities to humans goes but as soon as it become more human-like it suddenly has a spike into a more positive response from people.

Symptoms

There are many kinds of symptoms associated with a person suffering from pediophobia. A person who has this would usually hide any dolls they encounter or refuse to go near them. If they would get near a doll they would also be likely to feel embarrassment to their reaction, trembling, an elevated heart rate, inability to speak or think clearly, panic, dread, trembling, breathlessness, crying, and nausea. In worse cases an individual would have a feeling of insanity, a loss of control or anger, heart palpitations, a sensation of detachment from reality, or a full-blown anxiety attack.

Treatments

There are many forms of treatment for a person who has a phobia. One treatment is Hypnotherapy is one method of treatment that helps to redirect subconscious thoughts, which are probably a part of the fear. Another is Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Neuro-linguistic programming

Neuro-linguistic programming is an approach to psychotherapy, self-help and organizational change. Founders Richard Bandler and John Grinder say that NLP is a model of interpersonal communication and a system of alternative therapy which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective...

(NLP) in which the phobia is studied from the point of view of how an individual views reality and this point of view is refigured. The most popular form of treatment is energy psychology where the phobia is “relieved” from a person in an emotional acupuncture kind of way so as to relieve an individual of their fear and is one of the most common forms of therapy for people with a phobia. [6] Other treatments include behavior therapy, anti-anxiety medicine, psychotherapy cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, relaxation strategies, and medication.