English

Alternative forms

• height fear

Noun

height-fear ‎(plural height-fears)

1. The fear of being in a high location or position; fear of heights.
   • 2010, Bertram Gawronski, B. Keith Payne, Handbook of Implicit Social Cognition:

     In the area of specific fears and phobias more generally, there is evidence based on the IAT for greater implicit height–fear associations among people high (vs. low) in acrophobia symptoms [...]

   • 2012, Allan V. Horwitz, PhD, Jerome C. Wakefield, All We Have to Fear:

     For example, while we have seen that height fear is universal, its extent varies substantially among individuals.

   • 2013, Stekel, W, Conditions Of Nervous Anxiety And Their Treatment:

     From this point of view we shall more readily understand many cases of height-dizziness and height-fear.

   • 2013, Steven Hyman, Fear and Anxiety: The Science of Mental Health:

     Height fear emerges in infants shortly before they start crawling at six months (Scan: and Salapatek 1970) and rises with crawling experience (Berthenthal et al. 1983). As the two-year-old child explores further afield, animal fears emerge.

   • 2015, Irena Milosevic Ph.D., Randi E. McCabe Ph.D., Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear:

     Results indicated that individuals high in height fear made greater estimations of the balcony's height, even when taking into account measures of cognitive bias.

Synonyms

• acrophobia
• altophobia