Why We Phobia? The Regulatory Recoverability Horizon Model of Specific Phobia

Key pointsQuestion. Does a predicted deadline—the time remaining in which contin-ued engagement can still be made regulatable—govern when a personswitches to defensive termination, independently of threat, escape avail-ability, control, and the speed of the internal clock?Proposal. Specific phobia involves a persistent, cue-locked additive biasof that estimate, separable from the escape, imminence, control and timingchannels.What is new here. Of the eleven falsification gates this hypothesis commitsto, ten are simulable and all ten have now been run before any participantwas recruited (K1 is a procedural rule, not a simulation target). Six wererun in v6–v8: four of those failed, the design and one construct’s algebraicform were changed, and the repaired battery discriminates. The remainingfour (K3, K6, K8, K9) are run in this version: one is usable as written, twoneeded the same class of repair the earlier failures needed, and one isuninformative at any feasible sample size in its timing-only form.