Basophobia

Basophobia, also called basiphobia, is the fear of falling, a widespread and apparently innate fear found across humans and other mammals in varying degrees. It is distinct from acrophobia, the fear of heights themselves: basophobia centers on the anxiety of the sensation of falling and its possibly dangerous effects. Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk's visual cliff experiments showed that human infants already possess well developed depth perception and connect height to danger, and similar experiments with chicks, turtles, rats, lambs, kittens and puppies found that younger animals of many species instinctively avoid apparent drops. The fear grows more common with age, particularly among elderly people, for whom postural control problems, height vertigo from vestibular dysfunction, and space-motion discomfort increase reliance on visual cues for balance. A 1998 study found, somewhat counterintuitively, that children who had actually been injured in falls later showed less fear of falling than children who had not, suggesting the fear is not simply a product of traumatic experience.