Fear

Fear is a primitive and ultra powerful emotion and when activated it captures complete attention and dictates the future movements and thoughts. This is important; it is through the power of this emotion that we manage to avoid deadly situations, example: you are eating lunch and a bear runs at you! Do you run or do you challenge it. The two responses were first described in the 1920’s by the American physiologist Walter Cannon. They are called flight or fight; being a response sent from the Hypothalamus, the names chosen relate to the reaction of fleeing the fear stimulus or fighting it. To understand reactions of fear you must know what fear does. It causes a biochemical change; this is taken in charge by the sympathetic nervous system. When frightened the body releases adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormone), this mix causes a burst of energy, increasing the heart rate, slowing digestion and directs the blood to major muscle groups. The biochemical reaction is likely an evolutionary development and is an automatic response that is crucial to survival.Paul Ekman, the leading researcher on universal emotions, gave a very good example of a third reaction to fear: ‘’Many animals first freeze when confronted by a danger, such as a potential predator, presumably because that decreases the likelihood that they will be noticed. I saw this when I approached a group of monkeys in a large cage. Most of the monkeys froze as I got close, in an effort to avoid detection. When I moved even closer, so that the direction of my gaze made it obvious which monkey I was looking at, that monkey then fled..’’. This shows how even if naturally fear makes blood flow to the large muscles in the legs, we could react differently if deemed appropriate.Like in other emotions there are different intensities, for example like in anger or sadness. In fear it is not necessarily the longer the emotion the stronger it is, this is true because of three factors. Timing; is the harm immediate or impending? If its pending you can feel fear for a longer period of time. There are other factors as well like intensity; how severe is the harm that is threatened, and coping; are there actions that can be taken to reduce or eliminate the threat?

Origins of fear

President Franklin Roosevelt said: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I think he was right, actually. The fear of fear has most likely caused more problems than fear itself. But where does it come from, are we born with our fears or do we develop them? Behaviourist John B. Watson’s famous experiment Little Albert shows that you can condition a fear, but I believe there is more to fear then conditioning after all some fears are situations that have never presented themselves. Even if we are conditioned to have certain fears and they actually represent a large portion of a individual’s fear, the base of instincts is fear and after all we are all born with this sixth sense. The real question is the following: does a child fear or does he mirror the emotion of his surroundings?When I started my research on fear I was sure it was inborn and that we are born with fear of certain things, after all there is research showing that people are more likely to fear something that their predecessor feared: spiders, snakes, ect... Also this is why people are more likely scared of spiders then guns. But there is extensive research to be done to answer this even if there are signs of fears being genetically transmitted. There is one experiment that supports this, that it is not a major factor in the question of origins of fear. This experiment is called the visual cliff and was conducted in the 1960’s by Gibson, E.J. & Walk, and R.D. Initially psychologists believed that this experiment would show the correlation between visual/physical maturity and avoiding the ledge. Because six-month-old infants could be enticed to wiggle across the visual edge, while ten-month-old babies refused to cross the cliff, it was assumed that the younger children had not yet developed depth perception. But later in 1978 Dr.Campos, et al. made an interesting discovery, using the cliff experiment model they showed that children as young as three months old were able to perceive the visual cliff! When placed on the ledge, their heart rate quickened, eyes widened and breathing rate increased. Those are clear signs that the child did learn the consequence of going over a cliff and potentially falling. The fact that the physiologies of the kids change and becomes one of fear is a clear indication that the child is scared and it shows that the child did not fear the potential harm from falling before the age of three months.

Anxiety Disorders

One of the paradox’s of psychology is the following, ‘’ trying to not be scared of something only makes you fear it more’’ this is the fuel of many anxiety disorders according to the DSM IV. There are many related disorders:

• · Agoraphobia is anxiety about, or avoidance of, places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing) or in which help may not be available in the event of having a Panic Attack or panic-like symptoms.

• · Panic Disorder without Agoraphobia is characterized by recurrent unexpected Panic Attacks about which there is persistent concern.

• · Specific Phobia is characterized by clinically significant anxiety provoked by exposure to a specific feared object or situation, often leading to avoidance behaviour.

• · Social Phobia is characterized by clinically significant anxiety provoked by exposure to certain types of social or performance situations, often leading to avoidance behaviour.

• · Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is characterized by the re-experiencing of an extremely traumatic event accompanied by symptoms of increased arousal and by avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma.

• Acute Stress Disorder is characterized by symptoms similar to those of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that occur immediately in the aftermath of an extremely traumatic event

This shows how anxiety is closely related to fear, you can almost say it goes hand in hand. Fear and anxiety are very similar they produce the same automatic response. They are virtually the same except for a small crucial detail: you fear a known threat, for example a bear running at you. A person is anxious about an unknown threat, like walking in a dark alleyway thinking something is there with you. They both produce the same physiological changes without that distinction of known threat and unknown harm they would mean the same thing.

Also when it comes to fear I would like to point out one basic fact. When talking about conditioning, extinction is a term used to describe the gradual weakening of a conditioned response that result in the behaviour decreasing or disappearing. So if we learn most of our fears through conditioning we can always take the time to make ourselves less vulnerable to the stimulus if deemed appropriate.

Courage is one step ahead of fear!

Written by: Tarek Benzouak

#emotions