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What Is the Allure of Fear

1. introduction.

James B. Weaver, III, Ph.D. Research on the entertainment media has a long and storied history. Whether in the theater, at the movies, in front of the television set, or in industry-sponsored research laboratories, many social scientists have examined the psychological effects of various forms of media content upon citizen-consumers. The prevailing paradigm has been to study the potential terrors media can inflict, through content analyses of violence and other forms of "inappropriate" content, and through empirical studies documenting how viewers react to such content. For example, by feeling afraid or being aggressive. Results of such research have been used to shape media content, public policy, and legal practice. One criticism of this literature is that it does not address the self-evident question, "Why do people want to expose themselves to entertainment that might make them feel uncomfortable in the first place?" By its nature, an answer to this question would probe the subjectivity and complexity of individual response and therefore would fall outside of the objective, empirical positivism of the prevailing paradigm. Ensconced in the secure shores of objective empirical clarity, how can the social science community be asked to study the lure, the attractiveness, the enduring societal popularity of fear? I shall argue that the psychology of the lure of fear is a potentially rich but largely uncharted territory.

1.1. Background and Significance

The concept of fear has long held the fascination of scholars in various academic disciplines. Tales threaded with themes of terror have been a common staple in literature from the beginning of caveman culture right through to the present day. The images of fear have also captured the attention of artists and have been creatively rendered: Picasso did it; Goya did it. At the movies, there is an entire cadre of film lore that draws largely on the human lust for terror. These works are not just sheer fantasy. Whether the report is a narrative of personal experience, the diary of a family that chose to remain in place in the face of Hurricane Ivan, or documentation of historical events, such as the crisis at the Southwest High School in Miami in 1973, there is considerable evidence that clearly supports the supposition that human beings are drawn to fear due to a distinctive and visceral emotional response consistent with intense excitement and pleasure as well as aversion and strong feelings of discomfort or dread of personal injury. At first glance, the attraction to fear seems a statistical anomaly. Most people agree that being scared is not pleasant: in fact, most believe that it can be highly unpleasant. Further, it is common for part of the experience of an object believed to evoke fear to be quite terrifying in and of itself. Additionally, fear is not experienced by everyone all the time, but is often avoided or actively evaded. So if we pull fright and come to believe that it is indeed an experience we dislike and should actively avoid, why do we continuously expose ourselves to that experience by watching horror movies, riding on the newest roller coaster, keeping snakes and other potentially dangerous animals as pets, and engaging in "safe" alternatives set up to simulate those experiences. There is clearly an existing conflict between our affective response to these experiences and the choice to engage in them. This supports the theoretical position that we experience fear for a reason and that there likely exist some important benefits to be derived from this kind of response.

2. The Psychology of Fear

Fear is an inherent, absolutely essential survival tool. It is a vital aspect of the fight-or-flight response of our sympathetic nervous system. Very real fear about concrete, specific, and immediate threats serves a vitally adaptive goal in helping us to steer clear of such inherent dangers. Fear, in an adaptive context, motivates us to take the necessary actions designed to prevent our succumbing to them. Fear, meant to protect us from true and immediate danger, allows us to develop strategies for averting harm. However, fear that is no longer directed at true danger serves only to limit the fullness of our lives. Such fears, generally dependent on imagination, place severe limitations on personal growth. Panic, humiliation, helplessness, and the sense of devastation felt in the aftermath of a sudden natural disaster or some such physical trauma, or an act of terror, clearly distinguish between both the intensity and validity of a true danger-producing event and the exaggerated dwindling effects of chronic fears. Irrespective of the numerous prevalent fears or how overwhelming such fears are, no matter how real such fears feel, even if creative imagination conjures up a definitely tattooed visual picture of a feared monster lurking in every dark corner, such fears are rooted in imagination. Infinitely different in level and incidence from fears of concrete objective physical dangers, a specific amount of fear is a necessary and inevitable part of children's learning to find their way among the perceived physical dangers along life's path. Between the ages of six months to a year, children react to a collection of basic fears, such as those triggered by loud noises and sudden movements. Children experience the fear of strangers, the fear of animals, the fear of falling, drowning, and the fear of the dark. These fears do not produce a lasting terror; they appear and disappear. They serve to remind us that fear in a valid context can play an important role in the learning process of children, one in which children learn to avoid potentially dangerous situations. Fear is directly related to personal safety.

2.1. The Nature of Fear

Sigmund Freud needs to be called to the stand in any discussion about emotional life. His advancement of understanding of basic emotional events is impressive, even more so kept within the context of known conceptual limitations, in considering these events as the products of responsiveness to particular stimuli rather than reflections of desirable or undesirable features of the objects thereby represented. Freud introduced a new perspective of thinking about our relationship to the environment. He used the term "affect" to name the emotional trauma and anxiety that, it was feared, "nervous" children sustained in relation to their parents. Through the years, child-rearing displaced Freud's model of the family dynamics, and affect was modified in meaning. The passage of time has brought to the attention of scientifically oriented research psychologists the urgency of examining emotion. An increasing number of studies focus on the experience and expression of various emotions, primarily under laboratory conditions. Intensive study of anxiety, noblest of emotional vestigial states, has recently been given a substantially broadened application, ranging from calling laboratory subjects to report their felt experience of an emotionally charged autobiographical incident or of a friend's plight, to explorations of fear as a component of psychotic symptomatology and of the experience of patients with head injury.

2.2. The Role of Evolution

Today we live in a very different world than the one our prehuman ancestors inhabited. But turn back the clock a few million years and the pressure imposed by natural selection would have been quite severe. In such a world, only creatures with a finely tuned capacity for fear would have had much chance of survival. The reptilian part of the human brain, with its ability to create fight or flight responses when threatened, is one reflection of the tremendous amount of evolutionary work that has gone into human fearfulness. Fear is universal in advanced organisms, and it must be so since its very presence is a matter of life and death. In our evolutionary click, creatures that responded powerfully to situations of genuine threat left more offspring than those that responded less powerfully; they were more likely to survive and therefore were more likely to pass on their genes. Fear conditioning paradigms are used to study fear learning. Research using animals has significantly advanced our understanding of the neural circuits involved, with several brain areas involved in processing and/or signaling fear. In the lizard, as in more complex vertebrates, neural responses in common pathways expressed in both appetitive and aversive behavior are influenced by fear-related signaling. From the evolutionary perspective, the expression and genetic factors affecting fear coincide with survival requirements in order to maintain the gene homeostasis of vertebrates, suggesting their greater importance. Therefore, the fear response as a survival strategy should be enhanced and less variable. Both fear and sexual signatures could be the primary survival strategies, even beyond the biological requirements of living, managing responses, and avoiding risk, which can favor gene participation in determining the tendency of fear as an inaugural step common to various neuroendocrine functions. The coevolution of the emergence, processing, and regulation mechanisms of fear in a genomic system could explain the differences in fear expression and its genetic variation between individuals and species.

3. The Appeal of Fear in Entertainment

Elemental Components of Sensation Testifying to the possessiveness of fear, or at least to the enduring fascination with which fear is observed, should be the impact of fear-derived experiences in film and television, in music, painting, and literature, in fantasy tours - that is, in any of the arts and entertainments to which a great portion of the world's artistic and educational talent is committed. What compels our devotion to entertainment grounded in fear? The simple answer is that fearing for a few hours can prodigiously entertain, arouse, exalt, and unite the entire organism. A more complex answer forces attention to the elemental components of sensation. Iris Murdoch has elegantly defined the essence of sight as "an elementary human delight." But even less pretentious senses rank with sight in delight and in arousal. Taste, smell, proprioception, and touch operate analogously. They can, one at a time or together, engage and entrance the organism, touch off fiddlesticks of arousal in choice portions, or intensively involve the whole. If depth perception served as the only office of sight, people might routinely enter dreams and regard sights in film, national parks, and old masters, the spotted jay or the moon, a Baedeker town or a lover's eyes, with affectionate indifference. A taste, by itself, sets in action all the great systems in which hunger, proprioception, and sex are so richly embedded that the finicky person has no chance to open the astonished mouth. Fight-or-flight is Halley's comet among experiences. All elements of sensation that can contribute mightily when sprung singly or together us into spirited action, metaphorical or otherwise, have a more sober and regular purpose in life. And sensory events with these regular natural functions add relish to the impact of laughter and orgasm, all those elements of sensation derived from defense. The possession of such functions is what both links and separately tells us about laughter, and about fear.

3.1. Horror Films and Video Games

Modern horror films and video games seem to serve the same function: they shock and disgust the viewer, flooding him with stimuli that trigger fear reactions. They have a strong effect on the limbic system, the part of the brain associated with emotions and memory. They implant fearful images in the brain and inculcate a fear response. Horror films and video games are particularly intense vehicles for evoking horror, as they graphically present the fear-arousing stimuli, surrounded by a context specifically designed to shift the fear-arousing images. A comparison between the popularity of horror films and the popularity of horror stories reveals an American horror genre that has reached an extremely high rank of popularity. The forms of fear inspired by films and the forms of fear inspired by written texts engage the imagination in different ways and thus elicit different types of fear. The sensorial and emotional environment of film is forced upon, transmitted, and accepted. The images corresponding to the fear triggers in film are filled with information about space and time not found in the relatively simple stimulus lists of horror stories. The allure of watching a horror film often involves more than just the thrilling fear response. That the biorhythmic system has evolved to value is suggested by the study that shows that the most pleasing odors affect the human limbic system.

4. Conclusion

What then accounts for the allure of fear? In answer to this question, I have suggested that a consideration of the subjective reactions and conditioned fears generated by horror films might shed some light on this paradox. My basic thesis is that the more inferior we believe we are to those who possess power, control, and standing, the more negative our fears become and the more fascinated—and aroused—we become by these fears. In conclusion, let me reiterate that there is no intrinsic reason why horror films could not serve as potent social agents for personal and social change by providing audiences with perceptual insight as to the existential basis of social fears experienced in everyday life in contemporary consumer society. For underlying the entertaining commercial packaging of sex and violence, many horror films provide telling insights about politics, sex and other forms of social power, and they frequently parley this insight into imaginative forms of narrative resolution which are in marked contradistinction to the simplistic solutions formally recommended by other commercial films. For example, if we interpret horror films as parables of guilt and fear retribution, we come to clearly understand the relationship between existing social institutions and social disparities on the one hand and social guilt and seated fear vis-a-vis the poor and powerless on the other. Similarly, if we interpret horror films as social torments linked to social instability, we come to realize that society's inability to accommodate the aspirations of various social factions creates new torment stories that are told merely to demonize alternative lifestyle possibilities and persuade the majority to renounce their exotic aspirations. Consequently, if we fear the imminent realization of dissonant societies, we might view social criticism films (and in this context, horror films) as vital public services provided by the media.

4.1. Implications and Future Research

This research suggests that assessments of the benefits of fear need to be reconsidered. Usually we think about fear only in terms of its costs (e.g., with respect to work productivity, health, loss of utility from expenditures of resources), not its potential benefits. And more broadly, scholars have argued that research attention in general trends towards the negative aspects of emotional experiences, to the neglect of the potentially positive aspects of such states (or the feelings of sadness, pride, regret, sympathy, anger, happiness that may arise from the same situation). In general, the upshot of concern for the social consequences of emotions has led to recommendations to redress the bias towards the negative in policy positions and decision making. The work also points to another important avenue for future research. The 9 studies that provide the empirical tests of the hypotheses use a wide range of fear elicitors in a wide range of contexts: studies were done employing both visual and auditory elicitors of fear; students were employed as participants, as were professional skydivers; other studies were run in a safe indoor laboratory setting, as well as in a naturalistic setting (i.e., the field skydive center). These data suggest many other interesting questions about the domain generality and robustness of the effects reviewed herein. For example, does the relationship between fear and enjoyment hold for other emotions (e.g., those negative emotions such as sadness, guilt, or anger) or for other types of feeling-states (e.g., stress-related tension), and for which activities are these hypothesized effects most (least) likely to be seen?

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Why Do Some Brains Enjoy Fear?

The science behind the appeal of haunted houses, freak shows, and physical thrills

This time of year, thrillseekers can enjoy horror movies, haunted houses, and prices so low, it’s scary. But if fear is a natural survival response to a threat or danger, why would we seek out that feeling?

Dr. Margee Kerr is the staff sociologist at ScareHouse , a haunted house in Pittsburgh that takes all year to plan. She also teaches at Robert Morris University and Chatham University, and is the only person I’ve ever heard referred to as a “scare specialist.” Dr. Kerr is an expert in the field of fear. I spoke with her about what fear is, and why some of us enjoy it so much.

Why do some people like the feeling of being scared, while others don’t?

Not everyone enjoys being afraid, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that no one wants to experience a truly life-threatening situation. But there are those of us (well, a lot of us) who really enjoy the experience. First, the natural high from the fight-or-flight response can feel great. There is strong evidence that this isn’t just about personal choice, but our brain chemistry. New research from David Zald shows that people differ in their chemical response to thrilling situations. One of the main hormones released during scary and thrilling activities is dopamine, and it turns out some individuals may get more of a kick from this dopamine response than others do. Basically, some people’s brains lack what Zald describes as “brakes” on the dopamine release and re-uptake in the brain. This means some people are going to really enjoy thrilling, scary, and risky situations while others, not so much.

Lots of people also enjoy scary situations because it leaves them with a sense of confidence after it’s over. Think about the last time you made it through a scary movie, or through a haunted house. You might have thought, Yes! I did it! I made it all the way through! So it can be a real self-esteem boost. But again, self-scaring isn’t for everyone, and there are lots of psychological and personal reasons someone may not enjoy scary situations. I’ve talked to more than a handful of people who will never set foot in a haunted house because they went to a haunt at a young age and were traumatized. I always recommend parents thoroughly check out the content and rating of a haunted attraction before bringing a child. The chemicals that are released during fight-or-flight can work like glue to build strong memories (“flashbulb memories”) of scary experiences, and if you’re too young to know the monsters are fake, it can be quite traumatic and something you’ll never forget, in a bad way.

What happens in our brains when we’re scared? Is it different when we’re scared “in a fun way” versus being actually afraid?

To really enjoy a scary situation, we have to know we’re in a safe environment. It’s all about triggering the amazing fight-or-flight response to experience the flood of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine, but in a completely safe space. Haunted houses are great at this—they deliver a startle scare by triggering one of our senses with different sounds, air blasts, and even smells. These senses are directly tied to our fear response and activate the physical reaction, but our brain has time to process the fact that these are not “real” threats. Our brain is lightning-fast at processing threat. I’ve seen the process thousands of times from behind the walls in ScareHouse—someone screams and jumps and then immediately starts laughing and smiling. It’s amazing to observe. I’m really interested to see where our boundaries are in terms of when and how we really know or feel we’re safe.

What qualities do “scary things” share across cultures, or does it vary widely?

One of the most interesting things about studying fear is looking at the social constructions of fear, and learned fears versus those fears that appear to be more innate, or even genetic. When we look across time and across the world, we find that people truly can become afraid of anything. Through fear conditioning (connecting a neutral stimulus with a negative consequence), we can link pretty much anything to a fear response. Baby Albert , of course, is the exemplar case of this. The poor child was made deathly afraid of white rabbits in the 1920s, before researchers were required to be ethical. So we know that we can learn to fear, and this means our socialization and the society in which we are raised is going to have a lot to do with what we find scary.

Each culture has its own superhero monsters—the Chupacabra (South America), the Loch Ness Monster, the Yōkai (supernatural monsters from Japanese folklore), Alps (German nightmare creatures)—but they all have a number of characteristics in common. Monsters are defying the general laws of nature in some way. They have either returned from the afterlife (ghosts, demons, spirits) or they are some kind of non-human or semi-human creature. This speaks to the fact that things that violate the laws of nature are terrifying. And really anything that doesn’t make sense or causes us some sort of dissonance, whether it is cognitive or aesthetic, is going to be scary (ax-wielding animals, masked faces, contorted bodies).

Another shared characteristic of monsters across the globe is their blurred relationship with death and the body. Humans are obsessed with death; we simply have a hard time wrapping our mind around what happens when we die. This contemplation has led to some of the most famous monsters, with each culture creating their own version of the living dead, whether it’s zombies, vampires, reanimated and reconstructed corpses, or ghosts. We want to imagine a life that goes on after we die. Or better yet, figure out a way to live forever. Again, though, that would violate the laws of nature and is therefore terrifying. So while the compositions and names of the monsters are different, the motivations and inspirations behind their constructions appear across the globe.

What are some early examples of people scaring themselves on purpose?

Humans have been scaring themselves and each other since the birth of the species, through all kinds of methods like storytelling, jumping off cliffs, and popping out to startle each other from the recesses of some dark cave. And we’ve done this for lots of different reasons—to build group unity, to prepare kids for life in the scary world, and of course, to control behavior. But it’s only really in the last few centuries that scaring ourselves for fun (and profit) has become a highly sought-after experience.

My favorite example of one of the early discoveries of the joys of self-scaring is actually found in the history of roller coasters. The Russian Ice Slides began, not surprisingly given the name, as extended sleigh rides down a snowy mountain in the mid-17th century. Much like they do today, riders would sit in sleds and speed down the mountain, which sometimes included additional man-made bumps to make it a little more exciting. The Russian Ice Slides became more sophisticated throughout the 18th century, with wooden beams and artificial mountains of ice. Eventually instead of ice and sleds, tracks and carriages were constructed to carry screaming riders across the “Russian Mountains.” Even more exhilarating terror came when innovative creators decided to paint scary scenes on the walls that shocked and thrilled riders as they passed by. These came to be known as “Dark Rides.” People were terrified, but they loved it.

We haven’t just enjoyed physical thrills—ghost stories were told around the campfire long before we had summer camps. The Graveyard Poets of the 18th century, who wrote of spiders, bats, and skulls, paved the road for the gothic novelists of the 19th century, like Poe and Shelly. These scary stories provided, and continue to deliver, intrigue, exhilaration, and a jolt of excitement to our lives.

The 19th century also brought the precursors to the haunted attraction industry. Sideshows or “Freak Shows,” and the museums and houses of “oddities,” have existed since the mid-1800s. Perhaps the most notable is Barnum’s American Museum, operated by P. T. Barnum, best known for being half of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. His museum contained things like monkey torsos with fish tails attached , and other characters meant to frighten and startle. Much like modern haunts, customers would line up to challenge themselves and their resilience and dare each other to enter the freak shows and face the scary scenes and abnormalities. The haunted-attraction industry has come a long way from fish tails and plastic bats—modern haunts incorporate Hollywood-quality sets, and a crazy amount of modern technology all designed to scare us silly.

There’s a common belief that if you meet somebody for the first time in a fearful situation, you’ll feel more attached or more attracted to that person than you would if you’d met them in a low-stress situation. Is there any truth to that?

One of the reasons people love Halloween is because it produces strong emotional responses, and those responses work to build stronger relationships and memories. When we’re happy, or afraid, we’re releasing powerful hormones, like oxcytocin, that are working to make these moments stick in our brain. So we’re going to remember the people we’re with. If it was a good experience, then we’ll remember them fondly and feel close to them, more so than if we were to meet them during some neutral unexciting event. Shelley Taylor discussed this in her article “Tend and Befriend: Biobehavioral Bases of Affiliation Under Stress.” She shows that we do build a special closeness with those we are with when we’re in an excited state, and more important, that it can be a really good thing. We’re social and emotional beings. We need each other in times of stress, so the fact that our bodies have evolved to make sure we feel close to those we are with when afraid makes sense. So yes, take your date to a haunted house or for a ride on a roller coaster; it’ll be a night you’ll never forget.

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97 Fear Essay Topics & Examples

🏆 best topics about fear & essay examples, 📌 good fear essay topics, ❓research questions about fear.

If you study psychology, you will probably have to write a fear essay at some point. The emotion is strong and can significantly affect any person, with effects potentially impairing his or her judgment and performance.

It can also result from a variety of sources, such as phobias or trauma, and manifest in many different conditions, taking the person by surprise. As such, it is essential to study the topic of how a person may deal with fear, with the most well-known one being courage.

However, there are many ideas on how the trait can be developed that can be used as fear essay hooks, but not all of them are viable. This article will help you write a powerful essay on the various topics associated with fear.

Fear is an emotion triggered by a perceived threat as a response that prepares the person to address it in an appropriate manner. As such, it is a reaction that helps people cope in the short term, but its effects when the person is constantly in a state of fear can be dangerous.

Examples include physical health deterioration due to the hormone production associated with the reaction and permanent mental health effects, such as PTSD.

As such, people who are affected by chronic fear should try to escape the state to avoid threats to their well-being. The first step towards doing so would be to discover and investigate the causes of the emotion.

Fear triggers in response to danger, whether real or perceived, and the nature of the reaction can provide you with ideas for fear essay titles. While it may be challenging to alleviate real conditions of real danger, not many people have to live in such situations.

Most chronic fear comes from various phobias, or persistent fear reactions to situations that may not warrant such a response. There are numerous variations, such as acrophobia, the fear of heights, and they are interesting topics for an investigation.

Between the many tall buildings designed by people and travel methods such as airplanes, a person with the condition may find it challenging to avoid stressful situations. However, they can generally avoid worrisome conditions with careful planning and the help of others.

Courage is a well-known quality that helps people overcome their fear, one that is described in many stories and images. However, it should be noted that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather a willingness to acknowledge it and confront the source.

The act involves a conscious effort of the will, and many people believe they do not have the capacity to do so. You should discuss the ways in which people can learn to be courageous and the methods that can be used to inspire them to try.

Here are some additional tips for enhancing your essay:

Focus on the positive implications of fear and courage, as they are responsible for many of humanity’s great successes, and provide fear essay examples. Our society is safe from many different dangers because people were afraid of them.
Make sure to cite scholarly sources wherever appropriate instead of trying to rely on common knowledge. Psychology is a science that has developed considerably since its inception and can offer a wealth of knowledge.
Follow standard essay formatting guidelines, such as the use of academic language, the separation of different essay parts with appropriate titles, and the use of an introduction and conclusion.

Get more fear essay theses and other useful paper samples at IvyPanda!

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The Movie “Color of Fear” The issue of racism is introduced by the film’s director right from the beginning. Therefore, by the end of the video the issue of race is already embedded in the mind of the viewer.
”Courage to Teach” by Palmer: How to Deal With Fear The relationship between the teacher and the student is a very important element of the teaching process according to the author, meaning that the human condition must be considered in the process of teaching.
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October 10, 2019

48 min read

On the Nature of Fear

Experts from the fields of human and animal affective neuroscience discuss their own definitions of fear and how we should study it

By Dean Mobbs , Ralph Adolphs , Michael S. Fanselow , Lisa Feldman Barrett , Joseph E. LeDoux , Kerry Ressler , Kay M. Tye & Nature Neuroscience

Arjo Van Timmeren Getty Images

What is fear? The answer seems simple, yet a vigorous debate concerning its meaning has been playing out over the vista of affective neuroscience. This debate has a long history, but it was recently reignited by Joseph LeDoux, who proposed that we should not only redefine fear but also change the way we experimentally investigate this emotion. At the core of this debate lies the view that emotions are conscious, subjective states. For example, ‘feelings’ related to fear, such as horror or terror, are cognitively assembled conceptions of one’s situation, rather than preformed, innate mental states inherited from animals. LeDoux thus argues such complex states of the human brain cannot be studied in animals. Instead, he proposes that ‘defensive survival circuits’ that underlie defensive behaviors be the focus of research in animals. These hard-wired circuits are proposed to be orthogonal to subjective fear states that presumably involve higher-order circuits—they can modulate but do not determine the emotion. An equally provocative theory is Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ‘theory of constructed emotion’, which proposes that the human brain constructs instances of fear as a consequence of predicting and inferring the cause of incoming sensory inputs from the body (i.e., interoceptive and somatosensory inputs) and the world (i.e., exteroceptive inputs). Barrett proposes that a brain is continually projecting itself forward in time, predicting skeletomotor and visceromotor changes and inferring the sensory changes that will result from these motor actions. Probably most controversial about Barrett’s theory is that it proposes that fear, like other emotion categories, does not have a hard-wired neuroanatomical profile but is part of a dynamic system in which prediction signals are understood as ad hoc, abstract categories or concepts that are generatively assembled from past experiences that are similar to present conditions. In this view, the brain is a categorization machine, continually creating contextually relevant concepts that are appropriate to an animal’s niche.

These thought-provoking views seem to go against other prominent views, such as the basic (or primary) fear circuits theory of the late Jaak Panksepp and other celebrated luminaries in the field (for example, Michael Davis, Robert Bolles, O. Hobart Mowrer). For example, Ralph Adolphs emphasizes the universality of defensive behaviors, which adds credence to the view that fear circuits are mirrored across species and therefore partly innate. Michael Fanselow proposes that fear (and anxiety) can be placed along a threat-imminence continuum, which acts as a general organizing principle, and where threat intensity can be linked to motivational processes and defensive behaviors. Likewise, Kay Tye suggests that fear is a negative internal state that drives and coordinates defensive responses. These views see defensive behaviors as the manifestation of hard-wired fear (or survival) circuits and are controlled and modified by cognitively flexible circuits. While this debate has begun to wash up on the shoreline of clinical science and practice, there is still much needed agreement between the fields of basic and clinical science on how to define and investigate fear and anxiety. Here we asked some of the most influential contemporary scientists to discuss their perspective. Covering both human and animal research, each will present one argument for each of the discussion points below.

Q1: Dean Mobbs (moderator): How do you define fear and how is your definition supported by neuroscience?

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Ralph Adolphs (RA): Fear can only be defined based on observation of behavior in a natural environment, not neuroscience. In my view, fear is a psychological state with specific functional properties, conceptually distinct from conscious experience; it is a latent variable that provides a causal explanation of observed fear-related behaviors. Fear refers to a rough category of states with similar functions; science will likely revise this picture and show us that there are different kinds of fear (perhaps a dozen or so) that depend on different neural systems.

The functional properties that define the state of fear are those that, in the light of evolution, have made this state adaptive for coping with a particular class of threats to survival, such as predators. Fear has several functional properties—such as persistence, learning, scalability and generalizability—that distinguish emotion states from reflexes and fixed-action patterns, although the latter can of course also contribute to behavior.

The neural circuits that regulate an animal’s fear-related behavior exhibit many of these same functional properties, including in the mouse hypothalamus 2 , are initial evidence that this brain structure is not merely involved in translating emotion states into behaviors, but plays a role in the central emotion state itself. Neuropsychological dissociations of fear from other emotions show that fear is a distinct category.

Michael Fanselow (MF): Fear is a neural–behavior system that evolved to protect animals against environmental threats to what John Garcia called the external milieu (as opposed to the internal milieu), with predation being the principal driving force behind that evolution (for example, as opposed to a toxin). This is the organizing idea behind my definition of fear. The complete definition must also include the signals giving rise to fear (antecedents) and objectively observable behaviors (consequents). The neuroscientific support for this definition is that many signals of external threat, such as cues signaling possible pain, the presence of natural predators and odors of conspecifics that have recently experienced external threats, all activate overlapping circuits and induce a common set of behaviors (for example, freezing and analgesia in rodents). Equally important as neuroscientific support is support from fieldwork, which has repeatedly shown that behaviors such as freezing enhance survival in the face of predators.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (LFB): I hypothesize that every mental event, fear or otherwise, is constructed in an animal’s brain as a plan for assembling motor actions and the visceromotor actions that support them, as well as the expected sensory consequences of those actions. The latter constitute an animal’s experience of its surrounding niche (sights, sounds, smells, etc.), including the affective value of objects. Here ‘value’ is a way of describing a brain’s estimation of its body’s state (i.e., interoceptive and skeletomotor predictions) and how that state will change as the animal moves or encodes something new. The plan is an inference (or a set of inferences) that is constructed from learned or innate priors that are similar to the present conditions; they represent the brain’s best guess as to the causes of expected sensory inputs and what to do about them.

The function most frequently associated with fear is protection from threat. The corresponding definition of fear is an instance an animal’s brain constructs defensive actions for survival. A human brain might construct inferences that are similar to present conditions in terms of sensory or perceptual features, but the inferences can also be functional and therefore abstract, and thus they may or may not be initiated by events that are typically defined as fear stimuli and may or may not result in the behaviors that are typically defined as fear behaviors. For example, sometimes humans may laugh or fall asleep in the face of a threat. In this view, fear is not defined by the sensory specifics of an eliciting stimulus or by a specific physical action generated by the animal; rather, it is characterized in terms of a situated function or goal: a particular set of action and sensory consequences that are inferred, based on priors, to serve a particular function in a similar situation (for example, protection).

In cognitive science, a set of objects or events that are similar in some way to one another constitute a category, so constructing inferences can also be described as constructing categories. Another way to phrase my hypothesis, then, is that a brain is dynamically constructing categories as guesses about which motor actions to take, what their sensory consequences will be, and the causes of those actions and expected sensory inputs. A representation of a category is a concept, and so the hypothesis can also be phrased this way: a brain is dynamically constructing concepts as hypotheses about the causes of upcoming motor actions and their expected sensory consequences. The concepts or categories are constructed in a situation-by-situation manner, so they are called ad hoc concepts or categories. In this way, biological categories can be considered ad hoc conceptual categories.

Joseph LeDoux (JL): I have long maintained that conscious emotional experiences are, like all other conscious experiences, cognitively assembled by cortical circuits. Fear, for example, is a conscious awareness that you are in harm’s way. Activation of subcortical circuits controlling behavioral and physiological responses that occur at the same time can intensify the experience by providing inputs to the cognitive circuits, but they do not determine the content of the experience. The experience itself, in my model, is the result of pattern completion of one’s personal fear schema, which gives rise to some variant of what you have come to know as one of the many varieties subsumed under the concept of ‘fear’ that you have built up by accumulating experiences over the course of your life. Fear can even occur when some or all of the subcortically triggered consequences are absent: when the threat alone generates memory-based expectations that mentally simulate the missing elements, thereby pattern-completing your fear schema. Fear is often said to be universal. But instead what is universal is danger. The human expereince of being in danger is personal and unique. While other animals may have some kind of experience when in danger, it is not possible to scientifically measure what they experience, and if we could, it is unlikely it would be equivalent to the kind the of cognitively assembled personal awareness of being in harm’s way that humans experience. Such a cognitive account would seem necessary to explain, in one framework, the variety of threatening situations in which one can consciously experience fear (for example, predatory, conspecific, homeostatic, social, existential).

Kerry Ressler (KR): My definition of fear is one that is pragmatic and clinical, perhaps a ‘functionalist’ definition from Adolph’s perspective. ‘Fear’ is the combination of defensive responses—physiological, behavioral and (perhaps in the case of humans) the conscious experience and interpretations of these responses—that are stimulated by specific stimuli. In the case of experimental systems these stimuli are external cues, but presumably in humans can have internal representations as well (thoughts and memories that can be fear-inducing cues themselves). Such fear-inducing cues result in active defensive responses that gradually subside when the stimulus is no longer present. Clinically, fear can be thought of as mirroring the response to a specific cue (for example, the fear of snakes), while anxiety is a more long-lasting phenomenon that may not be specific to overt cues. Decades of preclinical neuroscience studies examining mechanisms of Pavlovian fear or threat conditioning have, in conjunction with human neuroimaging work, indicated the involvement of multiple brain regions in communication with the amygdala and its downstream connections in support of the ‘hardwired’ regulation of subcortical and brainstem areas mediating the cardiovascular, respiratory, autonomic nervous system, hormonal, startle, freezing and other behavioral ‘fear’ or ‘threat’ reflexes.

Credit: Ekaterina Nosenko Getty Images

Kay Tye (KT): Fear is an intensely negative internal state. It conducts orchestration of coordinated functions serving to arouse our peak performance for avoidance, escape or confrontation. Fear resembles a dictator that makes all other brain processes (from cognition to breathing) its slave. Fear can be innate or learned. Innate fear can be expressed in response to environmental stimuli without prior experience, such as that of snakes and spiders in humans and to predator odor in rodents. Fear associations—primarily studied in the context of Pavlovian fear conditioning—are the most rapidly learned (one trial), robustly encoded and retrieved, and prone to activate multiple memory systems. Given its critical importance in survival and its authoritarian command over the rest of the brain, fear should be one of the most extensively studied topics in neuroscience, though it trails behind investigation of sensory and motor processes due to its subjective nature. Watching others exhibit the behavioral expressions and responses of fear may invoke emotional contagion or support learning about the environment. The usage of the term ‘fear’ in the field of behavioral neuroscience has taken on a related—but distinct—meaning through the extensive use and study of a very stereotyped behavioral paradigm originally termed ‘fear conditioning’. Fear conditioning is arguably the most commonly used behavioral paradigm in neuroscience and has been most comprehensively mined in terms of neural circuit dissection with rodent models but has also been used in humans, primates and even invertebrates. Fear conditioning refers to the Pavlovian pairing of a conditioned stimulus (most often an auditory pure tone) with a foot shock that is most often presented upon the termination of the conditioned stimulus.

Q2: How does your theory of fear separate neural circuits for feeling, perception and action?

RA: I don’t claim to have a theory, but in my view fear, feeling, perception and action are all distinct. Fear causally interacts with many other processes, including perception, action planning, attention, memory and others. But it is distinct in that we can manipulate fear independently of many other cognitive variables. Losing perception, as in blindness, doesn’t make you lose fear, merely the ability to induce it visually; losing all behavior, as when paralyzed, also doesn’t make you lose fear; similarly for memory and other processes. It is important to note that a state of fear by itself does nothing: it needs to connect with all these other processes to result in behavior (as is the case for perception, attention, etc., themselves). Most important is the distinction between feeling fear (the conscious experience of fear) and the functional state of fear (the state that explains all the effects a threatening stimulus has on cognition and behavior). I’m agnostic about how these are related, but I think for methodological reasons, for example, the ability to study fear in nonhuman animals, we need to keep them conceptually separate. It is also very difficult to distinguish the neural correlates of feeling fear and the functional state of fear. All of the above suggest some cognitive architecture defined by constitutive and causal relations between processes. How this is actually neurally implemented in no doubt varies between phyla and classes; fear in an octopus will have very different neural details than fear in a human or a rat.

MF: It doesn’t. The relevant circuit integrates them; perception of threat leads to feelings and to actions. Activation of the fear state also feeds back on perceptual systems, altering how they react to environmental stimuli. The perception of threat is a critical determinant of both the magnitude of fear and the topography of defensive behavior. Note that not all actions stem from feelings, but all fear-related feelings lead to some change in action. If they didn’t, they would lose biological meaning and, to the extent that feelings require energy, they would be eliminated by evolution. A complete circuit connects and integrates these components into effective defensive patterns.

LFB: In my view, this is not the optimal question to ask about fear because it rests on an unfounded assumption that the brain is best understood as collections of neurons, grouped together in anatomically separate systems (neural circuits) for perceptions, mental events, feelings and various types of action (for example, freezing, running, etc.), which pass information back and forth to one another like a baton in a relay race. My research approach is guided by the alternative assumption that the brain should be understood as a complex dynamical system that is composed of elements: circuits or subnetworks made of neurons and supporting glial cells. These elements do not function independently of one another, because their arrangement and organization change dynamically. Even the neurons that constitute change dynamically. The brain, as a dynamical system, is continuously traversing through a succession of events, referred to as its state space, which is specified as values for a set of features that describe the system’s current state. Features are physical (for example, neural, physiological, chemical) and mental (perceptual, affective, cognitive, etc.). In this view, the brain works by prediction and correction rather than through stimulus and response. Within the dynamics of a particular state of the system perceptions are the result of motor preparation, rather than the other way around (as suggested by a stimulus–response approach).

JL: In my scheme, fear is the feeling of being afraid. I would refer to ‘perception’ and ‘action’ in this context as ‘threat detection’ and ‘defensive responding’. I view the experience of fear and behavioral reactions as separate consequences of threat detection and mediated by different but interacting circuits. Threat detection obviously starts with sensory processing, research on which is informative in illustrating the relationship between stimulus processing, behavior and experience. For example, studies of visual perception in patients with blindsight show that the path to conscious perceptual experience can be dissociated from the path to behavior. This suggests that the correlation of perceptual experience with behavior in healthy brains may be due to parallel processing of sensory information by different systems and does not necessarily mean that the experience and behavior are entwined in the brain. Perceptual researchers thus tend to be cautious when extrapolating from behavioral responses to experience. In terms of fear, blindsight is again informative. These patients respond to threats but do not report awareness of the threat stimulus or conscious feelings of fear; self-report of conscious feelings in such patients correlates with neocortical activity. Similarly, in subliminal-stimulation studies of healthy humans, threats activate subcortical defensive circuits involving the amygdala and elicit physiological responses in the absence of stimulus awareness; feelings are not reported even when specifically asked about. The circuits that control behaviors that are only sometimes correlated with fear experiences are thus not necessarily the circuits that underlie the experiences. When we label these circuits and behaviors with the term ’fear’ we propagate conceptual confusion.

KR: I think that we can, at a neuroscience level, make some distinctions between the sensory components (for example, sensory thalamus and cortex: feeling), integrative cognitive components (for example, associative cortex and medial prefrontal cortex: perception) and reflexive and behavioral components (for example, amygdala, striatum, brainstem: action). However, how these distinct circuits map upon conscious vs. behavioral aspects of fear processing may be more difficult to parse. Progress in dissecting the neural connections of fear and threat has contributed to our understanding of how they regulate the autonomic, physiological and behavioral activity patterns that together comprise the ‘fear reflex’, which appears to be highly conserved across species. Some aspects of these different components are clearly represented in similar areas—for example, medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala activation are seen with threat perception in humans, but are also clearly involved in actions underlying threat behaviors across species—whereas other regions, for example, brainstem nuclei, may be involved primarily in the action component of the fear process.

KT: Initial information flow arrives via sensory inputs that propagate to limbic circuits (for example, amygdala), which then feeds forward to downstream targets (for example, striatum, basal ganglia), where emotional state combines with threat imminence to promote action selection. Limbic signals can then feed back onto the sensory systems to alter perception. Fear itself does not map onto an individual motor output; it is an intermediate process that links sensory processing to action selection. My current conceptual model consists of three psychological processes that determine importance (or salience), valence and action, respectively. These three processes are mediated by different circuits. For example, if a grazing deer hears a twig snap, it must initially assess the importance of the stimulus. If it is in a clear landscape with nowhere for a predator to hide, then the stimulus may be deemed unimportant and the deer may go on grazing. If the deer sees a familiar conspecific, then it may interpret the stimulus as a positive valence signal, prompting selection of agonistic social behavior or approach. If there is dense brush, then the potential threat of a predator signaled by the stimulus may trigger an internal state of fear. Given a fear state, the outcome depends heavily on threat imminence. For example, if the predator is far away or its location is unknown, it may be most adaptive to hide or freeze to avoid detection by the predator. If the predator is at an intermediate distance where detection is likely or has already happened, then escape may be the best strategy. If the predator is mounting an attack, then defensive behavior to fight off the predator may be the best response.

Credit: Getty Images

Q3: Are there different defensive circuits (for example, predatory vs. social, survival circuits, reactive vs cognitive fears), and if so, are they orthogonal or synergistic? What is the evidence for your position?

RA: Yes, I think there is very good evidence that there are neural circuits specialized for subtypes of fear. Fear is not one thing. For instance, a circuit involving the superior colliculus and periaqueductal gray has been dissected in some detail for mediating fear behaviors elicited by the sight of aerial predators in rodents. Conversely, the ventromedial hypothalamus has cell populations that participate in states of fear and respond to sounds or odors of conspecifics but not to aerial predators. There are also different circuits relating to threat imminence (anxiety, fear, panic). Work in humans with amygdala lesions has dissociated fear of teloreceptive stimuli (snakes, spiders, etc.) from fear of interoceptive stimuli (suffocation). To the extent that different types of threat require different adaptive behaviors, they would constitute different functional states—and this functional specialization should be reflected in the neural circuits. These relatively ‘dedicated’ neural circuits for subtypes of fear are subcortical, whereas cortical involvement is likely to feature ‘mixed selectivity,’ such that the same cortical neurons can encode the multiple actions that might need to be taken in an adaptive response to fear, depending on the circumstances.

MF: Yes. For example, the taste aversion–disgust–toxin avoidance system (Garcia’s internal milieu defense) is distinct from predatory defense (external milieu). In a nice demonstration of this, Bernstein’s lab showed that within the basolateral amygdala, taste (conditioned stimuli) and toxin (unconditioned stimuli) converge on different sets of neurons than contextual conditioned stimuli and shock unconditioned stimuli. This illustrates the common error of considering the basolateral amygdala as isomorphic with ‘fear’. It is not; it mediates several aversive and appetitive motivational systems that involve different cells and microcircuits within the amygdala. Another concern about purely amygdalocentric views is that not all antipredator defensive modules are equally dependent on the amygdala. For example, I proposed a circa-strike–panic defensive module that depends more on periaqueductal gray than amygdala. This model anticipated the finding that CO2-induced panic occurs in a patient with bilateral loss of the amygdala who otherwise is severely deficient in fear reactions. Interactions between different aversive systems, much like interactions between appetitive and aversive systems, are often inhibitory because the systems serve different functions and one function may need to take precedence over another; for example, inhibition of the pain or recuperative system via analgesic circuitry is part of the fear and defense system. But there is also convergence. In rodents, defense against predators (interspecies) and alpha males (conspecifics) activates very similar brain structures and behaviors, suggesting that there was substantial convergent evolution of these defenses. One reason my essay ( Supplementary Information ) provides for a rich (six-part) definition of fear is to help distinguish fear from other systems.

LFB: Neuroscience research on motor control has revealed that motor actions are not triggered by simple, dedicated circuits, but are assembled within a flexible neural hierarchy whose motor modules are in the spinal cord. I hypothesize that the same may be true for visceromotor actions. In this view, attempts to build taxonomies of simple defensive circuits are not scientifically generative. The presence of flexible neural hierarchies means that each behavior—such as freezing, fleeing and fighting—is not the result of one specific circuit, but instead may be implemented in multiple ways. In my view, a brain, as a single dynamical system, has the core task of regulating skeletomotor actions as well as visceromotor actions within the body’s internal milieu that supports those actions. This idea suggests that there are degenerate assemblies for each behavior, even in the same situation. Furthermore, the neurons that process sensory inputs (for example, in V1, primary interoceptive cortex) and the neurons that represent affective value all function in the service of actions and carry information about those actions, and therefore are part of the flexible hierarchy for action control.

JL: Nathaniel Daw and I recently proposed taxonomy of defensive behaviors and their neural underpinnings that might provide an organizational framework for considering some of the diverse levels of analysis implied in the present question. Included are reflexes, fixed reactions, habits, action–outcome behaviors and behaviors controlled by non-conscious and by conscious deliberation. For example, species-typical responses to predatory and social cues can be thought of as fixed reactions that are ‘released’ when different, but to some extent overlapping, subcortical ‘survival circuits’ are engaged. Also relevant are circuits that signal challenges to survival monitor homeostatic imbalances and initiate restorative behaviors. Instrumental, habitual behaviors are fixed but have to be learned and involve corticostriatal circuits, whereas action–outcome instrumental behaviors are learned but flexible and use different corticostriatal circuits. Deliberative instrumental responses are prospective and model-based, and they engage prefrontal circuits; here, non-conscious deliberation about danger allows rapid mental simulation of possible solutions, whereas in slower conscious deliberation, the experience of fear can guide future planning and action.

KR: For brevity, I will focus on ‘the’ amygdala, which is actually a complex of several cell clusters (nuclei) and is conserved from the most primitive mammals and in most vertebrates. It receives neural projections from essentially all sensory areas of the brain, as well as from memory-processing areas in addition to association and cognitive brain regions. It sends projections back to many of these areas, but most interestingly, also communicates with an array of brainstem and other subcortical areas. Notably, all of these circuits are involved in both defensive and appetitive behaviors, not to mention predatory vs. social behaviors, etc. Recent fascinating work has shown that even within the same subregion of the amygdala, neighboring cells can have opposing functions or more-nuanced functional differences; for example, they may respond preferably to proximal vs. distal threats. Such findings suggest that parallel information pathways, for example different cells encoding ‘fear-on’ vs. ‘fear-off’ information, flow through basolateral and central amygdala nuclei. Furthermore, the same cells that ‘turn off’ a fear response may be responsible for activating positive emotions, such as appetitive or even addictive behavior. Thus, these information channels may be better appreciated as underlying approach vs. avoidance related behaviors and drives. However, it is also possible that as such behaviors are parsed at a neural circuit level, they won’t match well onto our historic terminology of defensive circuits as outlined.

KT: Synergistic. Everything is connected in the limbic system, if not through direct reciprocal connections, then through neuromodulatory systems. Circuits that mediate different types of fear are likely to converge onto some common pathways, before diverging again for action selection. For example, animals can learn to fear an environmental stimulus through firsthand experience but also through observing others. We know that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) is a critical nucleus for translating sensory information into motivational significance for associations learned through direct experience and that observational fear learning requires both the BLA and the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex’s role is to interpret the demonstrator’s distress and send this signal to the BLA, where associative learning takes place.

Q4: How does (or can) your perspective fit with the others’ perspectives?

RA: My functional emphasis is probably closest to the views of Mobbs and Fanselow. I particularly like threat imminence theory, which is of course a functional theory. My view of fear as a state that is distinct from the conscious experience of fear seems aligned with LeDoux’s view with respect to that emphasis. This is a bit ironic, since I disagree with LeDoux’ conclusions (he redefines ‘fear’ to mean ‘the conscious experience of fear’), but I think he has written most clearly about the distinction, which is important. I would actually reinterpret his view as being about how we recognize that an organism is in a state of fear. We recognize this state in ourselves by having a conscious experience of fear; we recognize it in other people from their verbal reports or behavior; and we recognize it in animals from their behavior. If we want to be consistent, we should apply whatever meaning of ‘fear’ to both other humans and to animals, since the evidence is of the same type. Ressler’s and Tye’s views stay closer to the neurobiology, and I certainly share the view that a lot of questions about fear are empirical matters, mostly still needing resolution. There is no question that the science of fear, even in the absence of any agreement on conceptual or theoretical issues, will make progress and indeed will inform the conceptual and theoretical issues. I would agree that it’s productive to just get on with the neuroscience even without agreement about the philosophical issues; but I also think we need to continue to take stock and discuss the philosophical issues to get a sense of where we’re heading. Feldman Barrett’s view both shares some strong agreement with mine and is completely opposed. I share her emphasis on the context-dependency of emotions and, in particular, her attack on the notion that we can ‘read out’ emotions from facial expressions (indeed, we just co-authored a paper on this). But I disagree with her notion that there are no objective criteria to decide whether an animal or person is in an emotion state or in a particular type of emotion state.

MF: Like Adolphs’ approach, my approach emphasizing evolutionary demands is a take on functionalism; indeed, my first paper on predatory imminence was titled, “A functional behavioristic approach to aversively motivated behavior.” I resonate completely with Adolphs’ sentiment that “emotions are states of an organism that are defined by what they do.” I note that both Adolphs and LeDoux are critical of behavioristic approaches, but their criticism is leveled at radical behaviorism. My behaviorism is a product of Tolman’s cognitive behaviorism that emphasized purpose in behavior, although Tolman was more focused on immediate or proximal function (how do I get food here) as opposed to ultimate function (why do I seek food). Indeed, fear-related actions were phylogenetically programmed because they had a high probability of success over many generations, but the actions may be maladaptive in an immediate situation. This also means that any individual instance of these programmed behaviors may not be effective in the current situation. That is why any particular instance of fear behavior may seem, and actually be, irrational in the present moment. My approach appears to be in direct contradiction with both Feldman Barrett and LeDoux’s ideas that fear is entirely a higher-order conscious construction. The adaptive function of consciousness is typically viewed as providing flexibility and supporting deliberative, proximally rational, behavior. I think this stands at odds with the necessary features of life in the face of threat. Reactions have to be immediate; any time spent in deliberation increases the likelihood of death. Therefore, these fear reactions are phylogenetically programmed responses. When faced with a predator, there is no time to acquire behaviors based on trial and error and no time for novel planning. The contrast with Tolman is again instructive. Tolman emphasized variable means to fixed ends; if you have a cognitive map that reveals the location of food, the animal may use many different ways of getting to that food. The idea is quite similar to Feldman Barrett’s description of one-to-many mapping in motor systems. But Tolman’s theory was based on empirical work with a food reinforcer, where considerable flexibility is not only tolerated but beneficial: you don’t die if you miss one meal, and trying out something new may lead to a richer patch or a nutrient unavailable in the preceding meal. The demands of defense are entirely different. Hence, the rodent’s most studied food-getting response, lever pressing, is virtually impossible to investigate in the frightened rat.

LFB: Empirically, the scientific findings constitute a small subset of what remains to be discovered about the neurobiological basis of fear. My scientific approach differs substantially in its guiding ontological commitments than those that guide current research on the nature of fear.

JL: Each of the participants has laid out a cogent argument for their position. I enjoyed reading the essays, and I learned something new about what each author thinks. My ideas about the conscious experience of fear overlaps with Barrett's, as we both view fear as a cognitively assembled state that is based on mental models and conceptualizations of situations. For me, the other factors or ingredients that contribute to fear, such as brain arousal and feedback from body responses, modulate but do not determine the quality of the experience. On the other hand, my ideas about the role of brain areas such as the amygdala in detecting threats and initiating body reactions, and on the role of resulting motivational states that guide instrumental actions, are largely compatible with the views of the other contributors. Much of what we disagree about is semantic—in the presence of a threat, is fear the experience itself or all of the various consequences triggered by the threat? But to say the differences are semantic does not mean they are unimportant. Words are powerful. They underlie our conceptions and shape the implications of our theoretical points of view, and they influence what others conclude about our research. We should do our best to eliminate ambiguity and confusion in our scientific word choice. Our lexicon provides us ways to do this, and we should make use of the subtlety of our language when we use it scientifically. An easy way to start is to avoid using mental state terms to describe behaviors that are not based on mental states. In humans we can make these distinctions, and should then should certainly avoid using mental state terms to describe behavior in animals when in humans similar responses are not controlled by subjectively experienced mental states. I believe that words like threatening stimuli, defensive responses and defensive survival circuit characterize stimulus-response relations in animals better than fear stimuli, fear circuits and fear responses.

KR: In most ways, I agree with the other perspectives, in that I feel everyone is stating similar aspects of a broader shared understanding, but with nuanced differences. I think my perspective is most focused on the observation that in human neuropsychiatry research, the science of aversive behavior and fear-related disorders, along perhaps with appetitive behavior and addiction, is the most mature for clinical translation. Specifically, I agree with Adolphs’ idea that a “functionalist view of emotions like fear requires an interdisciplinary approach.” I agree with Fanselow’s defining characteristics of fear—a formalistic approach which I believe has much utility, in particular with regard to the differential experiential states that distinguish different functional modes between anxiety, fear and panic. I agree with Barrett that the features of fear “include some set of physical changes (autonomic nervous system changes, chemical changes, actions, etc.) and sensations that become perceptions of the surrounding world and the body.” I agree with LeDoux that “fear is a conscious experience in which you come to believe that you are about to be harmed” and with Tye on the importance of a conceptual model consisting of “three psychological processes that determine importance (or salience), valence and action, respectively.” While I also agree with many of the nuanced, philosophical, psychological, behavioral and neuroscience-based definitions, I don’t want to lose sight of how much progress has been made and how powerful the concept of ‘fear’ is to translational neuropsychiatry.

Q5: Do current behavioral assays for the study of fear restrict our ability to improve our understanding of fear?

RA: The contemporary assays are seriously flawed in that they compare apples and oranges between studies in animals and studies in humans. There are quite a number of behavioral assays for fear in animals, essentially none of which are used in studies in human studies, which instead typically use verbal reports as the ground truth. Since it’s impossible to use verbal reports in animals, the solution seems in principle straightforward: we need to adapt the behavioral batteries from animal studies to studies in humans. Only a few studies have attempted this. An additional challenge of course is ecological validity. Mobbs’ study of moving a tarantula closer and closer to your foot while you are in the scanner is a rare but classic success in this direction. The problem also extends to the stimuli used. There are many studies that present human subjects with facial expressions of emotions or that have them read short vignettes. Those studies may show something about social perception or people’s semantic knowledge about the concept of fear, but they do not assess the actual state of fear. I am quite concerned about the inadequacy of most experimental protocols to study human fear, which have disconnected the study of fear in humans from the study of fear in animals. Human studies need more ecologically valid stimuli and better behavioral assays, in particular ones that do not rely on verbal report and that can be argued to have some homology to the behavioral assays used in animal studies.

MF: Pavlovian fear conditioning is a natural component of how prey recognize predators and it works great in the lab. But its success comes with dangers. One of these dangers is that it has led to disproportionate emphasis on one module in the threat continuum (post-encounter–fear) and our knowledge of the other components (circa-strike–panic and pre-encounter–anxiety) lags behind. Perhaps an even greater danger is the tendency to treat procedure as isomorphic with process. Procedurally, fear conditioning is defined as pairing a neutral stimulus with an aversive one, but this procedure will not invariably condition a fear state because not all aversive stimuli support engagement of the antipredator defensive system. A toxin is clearly an aversive stimulus, but pairing a neutral flavor with a toxin leads to palatability shifts that reduce consumption and not an antipredator defense. Likewise, some shocks are sufficiently novel and powerful to condition fear but others are not; a mild shock may well be annoying but insufficient to condition fear. A rat’s behavior is more flexible with a very weak shock, but that flexibility is progressively lost as shock intensity increases. I take this loss of behavioral flexibility as diagnostic of a fear state. Therefore, one must be cautious when choosing shock intensity or letting subjects choose shock intensity. Additionally, other commonly used outcomes in human fear studies, such as loss of money, are unlikely to tap into the neural systems that support antipredator defense.

LFB: Contemporary paradigms, guided by the notion of simple, dedicated neural circuits for fear arranged in a single taxonomy, restrict the study of fear in several important ways. First, instances of fear are typically studied in laboratory settings that differ strongly from the ethological contexts in which they naturally emerge. All potential actions have an energy cost, and an animal’s brain weighs these against potential rewards and revenues in a particular context. Economic choices about actions, therefore, are necessarily influenced by a number of situation-specific considerations about an animal’s state and the state of the environment, most of which are held constant in the typical laboratory experiment. These factors not only influence which defensive action is executed (as suggested by some taxonomies of defensive behaviors), but also how any given action is implemented. Ignoring these factors make the neural causes of defensive actions seem more atomistic than they actually are, and as a consequence, most contemporary paradigms are insufficiently holistic (see my answer to Question 2). Second, contemporary paradigms confound things that should be kept separate. For example, it’s important to distinguish affect and emotion. Affective features such as valence and arousal are best thought of as low-dimensional summaries of higher-dimensional interoceptions that result from allostasis; valence and/or arousal might be intense during episodes of emotion but are not specific to those episodes. Because allostasis and interoception are continually ongoing in an animal’s life, valence and arousal are mental features that may describe every waking moment of that life. For this statement to make sense when comparing human and non-human animals, it is necessary to distinguish a brain’s capacity for consciousness (an experience) and its capacity for awareness (the ability to report or reflect on an experience); relatedly, it is important to distinguish perceiving the sensory features of the immediate context in a particular way from being aware of that perception (for example, an awareness of perceiving threat) and from the awareness of being frightened. It’s also important not to confound a threatening stimulus with the context in which the threat emerges, as often occurs in taxonomies of fear; brains don’t perceive stimuli, they perceive sensory arrays, i.e., ‘stimuli’ in context. And perhaps most importantly, one should not confuse observation and inference. Scientists measure things like skeletomotor actions (such as freezing) and the visceromotor actions that support those skeletomotor actions (such as changes in heart rate), which they might refer to as ‘fear’; correspondingly, they measure the change in neural firing that supports those actions, which they might refer to as ‘fear circuitry’. This approach confounds what is observed (for example, freezing, changes in heart rate) with their inferred cause (for example, fear). The science of fear would be more productive and more generative if the two were not routinely confused. When a scientist observes actions and infers an instance of fear, the scientist is engaging in emotion perception. Fear is always a perception—an inference—whether on the part of a scientist observing an animal’s actions, a human observing another human’s actions, or an animal making sense of its sensory surroundings as part of action control. No changes in the autonomic nervous system or skeletomotor actions are, in and of themselves, meaningful as fear. A brain makes them meaningful as fear with inferences (which can also be described as prediction signals or ad hoc concepts). An animal’s brain—human or otherwise—makes these inferences without awareness of doing so. From this perspective, understanding the neurobiological basis of inference is part of understanding the neurobiology of fear.

JL: A staple of research on fear has, of course, been the ‘fear’ conditioning paradigm. It has generated a large amount of useful information about how the brain detects and responds to danger. It can also be used to probe human participants about conscious experiences. But in studies of non-human animals, for reasons discussed in detail elsewhere, researchers can only measure behavioral and physiological responses. Because similar responses, including amygdala activation, can be elicited in humans with subliminal stimuli that are not consciously perceived and that do not engender reports of fearful feelings, the experience of fear would not seem to be driving the responses. For this reason, the amygdala circuit might be better thought of as a threat circuit or defense circuit than a fear circuit. Thus, the limits lie not in our paradigms; rather, the paradigm exposes the limits of what can be learned from animals versus humans when using these paradigms. Our understanding of fear is, however, limited by other things. One is the fact that truly frightening and traumatizing situations, for ethical reasons, cannot be used in laboratory studies of fear; milder proxies only give us hints, as brain responses do not scale linearly with stimulus intensity. Another is conceptual complacency and loose use of language. As noted above, popular views of fear and fear conditioning are tethered to Mower and Miller’s conceptualization dating back to the 1940s. The term ‘fear conditioning’ implies that the task reveals how fear arises. If one thinks of fear as a conscious experience, as I do, fear conditioning (or what I call ‘threat conditioning’) can in principle be used in animal studies to help understand processes that contribute indirectly to fear; but it cannot reveal the mechanisms underlying human fearful experiences, which can only be studied in humans (I do not deny animal consciousness as a natural phenomenon but question whether we can study this scientifically). I believe that the use of mental-state words like ‘fear’ to characterize behavioral control systems inevitably creates confusion and leads to misplaced expectations about what animal research can and cannot tell us. Thus, if someone uses the word ‘fear’, then he or she should clarify the intended meaning of ‘fear’ each time the term is used (for example, adding adjectives such as ‘conscious’ or ‘non-conscious’ or ‘explicit’ or ‘implicit’) to avoid confusion. Separating conscious ‘fear’ from non-conscious ‘threat processing’ from the start would avoid such confusion.

KR: The most common current approaches to study fear in preclinical model systems are based upon Pavlovian fear conditioning models—examining the different memory-related constructs of acquisition, expression, extinction, etc. of a fear memory—and use behavioral metrics of freezing, avoidance and startle. Similarly, in most human models, laboratories have sought to perform controlled experiments but generally using self-report or physiological outcome measures (for example, electrodermal skin response, heart rate or acoustic startle). A limitation to most translational studies is that the human and model-system studies generally do not use the same paradigms and same outcome metrics. Furthermore, using well-controlled learning paradigms makes it harder to explicitly define pathways and agreed-upon circuits related to innate or unconditioned fear cues, processes and behaviors, particularly in animal model systems. Generally, the more controlled and reductionist the experimental paradigm, the harder it is to observe and quantify natural threat response patterns and their underlying biology.

KT: I think having a very stereotyped behavioral paradigm for Pavlovian fear conditioning has facilitated reproducibility and a deeper dive into the anatomy and mechanism (for pairing pure tones to co-terminating foot shock in rodents). However, there are many other types of fear that have been understudied or not yet studied at all, leaving us with more depth and less breadth in our understanding of fear. At this point, the vast majority of publications on ‘fear’ refer to a very specific paradigm that is only a tiny subset of the neural mechanisms of this emotional state.

Q6: Can animal models inform us about human models of fear (and vice versa)?

RA: I would say studies in animals are essential to understanding fear, since they allow much better measurements and manipulations than is the case in humans—neither are ‘models’ of anything. The animal studies investigate animal fear; the human studies investigate human fear. No doubt there will be both similarities and differences between any different species, and some animals will have functionally defined fear states that are completely absent in others (animals that don’t live in an environment with aerial predators will not have the circuit involving the superior colliculus that processes that type of threat in mice). The reason I actually favor animal studies over human studies is that they can simplify what we are looking for. As I noted earlier, studies in humans typically mix the study of fear with the study of the concept of fear, the conscious experience of fear, or the verbal report of fear. A mouse certainly doesn’t have the verbal report, is unlikely to have the concept, and we don’t know how to measure its conscious experience—when confronted with a threat, it is just in a functionally specified state of fear. It is also much easier to induce ecologically valid emotions in animals (they don’t know they are in an experiment), and it is much more difficult for animals to volitionally regulate their emotions. For all these reasons, studying genuine, intense emotions in animals is far easier than studying them in humans and should be the place where neuroscientists start.

MF: Absolutely and they have. Wolpe’s development of exposure-type therapy was drawn from animal work by Pavlov and Hull and still stands as the signature treatment for anxiety disorders. Mobbs has provided a sophisticated expansion of predatory imminence theory that allows it to capture many of the unique features of human emotion.

LFB: Animal models can inform us about human instances of fear, but currently there are several obstacles. First, most animal studies are performed in just a few model species and fail to consider the similarities and differences in brain-based and niche-based features of different species and as model systems for neurotypical human brain development and function. The computational role of most major brain parts remains conserved across the vertebrate lineage, and all brains can be described as automatically and effortlessly forming inferences (i.e., ad hoc concepts) to categorize anticipated sensory inputs and guide action. But species may differ in the type of concepts that a brain can construct, due to general brain-scaling functions and the information available in an animal’s niche. For example, the human brain has expanded association cortices compared to other primates, enabling increased information compression and dimensionality reduction; this suggests that human brains may be able to create multimodal summaries characterized by more abstractio. This hypothesis in no way diminishes the importance of survival-related behaviors in human emotion, nor does it invalidate the importance of studying survival-related behaviors in animal models for the purposes of understanding the biology of human emotion. It does suggest, however, that solving the puzzle of human emotion—and human evolution more generally—may require a science of ‘emotion ecology’ that attempts to understand species-general and species-specific processes. Moreover, experimental animals are typically reared in impoverished laboratory settings with fewer opportunities to encounter the range of sensorimotor challenges than are typical in natural ethological contexts; this likely impacts brain wiring during development, prompting the question of whether lab animals are even ‘neurotypical’.

JL: The answer to this question is obviously yes, but the details depend on the animal in question and what one means by fear. Invertebrates can potentially inform us about cellular and molecular mechanisms of threat learning in mammals, including humans. Non-primate mammals can potentially inform us about circuits that detect threats and control various responses (for example, reactions, habits, instrumental actions). Non-human primates can potentially inform us about cortical circuits that underlie deliberative cognition. But in each case it is important to verify, to the extent possible, the relevance of the findings to humans by doing studies that approximate the animal studies in humans, albeit with less neurobiological detail. Human research is also necessary to study the conscious experience of fear and other emotions. This is true for at least two reasons. First, methodological barriers limit the assessment of consciousness in non-human animals. We can, as Jeffrey Grey put it, only creep up on consciousness using behavioral proxies in non-humans. Flawed though it is, verbal report is a powerful tool in humans. We can typically respond verbally or non-verbally to information which we are conscious of, but can only respond non-verbally to information for which we lack awareness; with only non-verbal responses, it is difficult to distinguish between conscious and non-conscious processing in other animals. Second, even if we assume that some non-verbal tests reveal aspects of consciousness in non-human animals, the nature of consciousness is likely to be quite different given the human brain's unique capacities for language, hierarchical cognition, conceptualization, prospective cognition and self-reflection, which I believe all contribute to fear and other emotional experiences.

KR: While it is clear that few, if any, animal models fully represent the complexity of human neuropsychiatric disorders, there is tremendous evidence for conservation across species—from mouse to human—for basic behaviors, including for many of the defensive threat responses and their underlying circuits. Data robustly suggest that appetitive and aversive behaviors, respectively, are underlying phenomena for the syndromes of addiction and fear-related disorders such as phobia, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, the subcortical amygdala, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), striatal, hippocampal and brainstem circuits, and to some extent aspects of cortical regulatory areas, are highly conserved in form and function across mammals. Decades of work has established a clear circuitry that has largely held up in human imaging and physiology studies and in rodent studies using modern tools such as optogenetics, chemogenetics, calcium and electrophysiology tools. While much more needs to be established, powerful approaches such as single-cell RNA-sequencing across regions and species, large-scale genetic tools combined with transcriptomics, and digital phenotyping across species are enabling truly novel and powerful translational approaches that do not model disorders per se, but instead model their component parts, from molecules to circuits to aspects of behavioral syntax that underlie the defensive ‘threat’ to ‘fear’ continuum.

KT: New technologies and methods can enhance our understanding of fear as they can advance our understanding of brain circuitry and function in general. Fear conditioning is often a first proof-of-principle behavioral paradigm used to validate new technologies because it is so robust and reproducible.

Q7: How can new technologies and methods enhance our understanding of fear?

RA: Much attention has been paid to increasing the precision of measurements and manipulations of the brain, but I think we need to improve the validity of stimuli and measurements of behavior. Only a few studies have used high-dimensional, multivariate measures of behavior. For instance, one can measure the change in the body surface over tens of thousands of little chromatophores that cuttlefish use to camouflage themselves, a measure that has been claimed to give us a direct readout of the animal’s perceptual state. Rich measures in humans would also seem achievable: we need to measure in detail people’s movements in 3D space, their whole-body blood flow and so forth. At the stimulus end, the best stimulus is the real world, and studies in an animal’s natural environment or in a person’s everyday life would help to provide validity to studies in the lab. Virtual reality could probably help here. Of course, behavior isn’t everything (fear doesn’t just function to cause behavior); interactions with other cognitive processes are important to quantify as well. In the ideal case we would probe not only how behavior changes over time when an ecologically valid threat stimulus is presented, but also how this affects memory, attention, perception and decision-making.

Credit: Dr. Chris Henstridge Getty Images

MF: Particularly useful is our ability to map large cellular networks that participate in different situations and behaviors. These have largely been achieved using immediate early gene imaging techniques such as catFISH. Above, I described Bernstein’s research that used this methodology to show that taste aversion and fear conditioning activate largely independent amygdala networks, helping us distinguish two aversive motivational systems. New implantable microscopes also hold considerable promise in advancing our understanding. But our conceptual understanding of phenomena cannot be sacrificed to these technical achievements; the two must advance hand-in-hand.

LFB: New technologies and methods can enhance our understanding of fear by providing the capacity to observe animals in a wider variety of highly variable ethological contexts using higher-dimensional measurement procedures with improved temporal and spatial specificity. The ability to measure and model naturalistic contextual variation is crucial, particularly for genetic studies; most genetic variation related to individual differences that predispose an animal to disease sits in non-coding regions of the genome, which are strongly influenced by context.

JL: The new methods available today are revolutionizing brain research. But sometimes the methods seem to take precedence over the questions. New methods can only help us if we have adequately conceptualized the problems. Complications from poorly designed studies are relatively easily corrected—just do a better experiment. Conceptual problems are harder to change. Ideas become dogma, and dogma typically goes unquestioned; new methods can’t fix that. It’s good that in this exercise we are taking a step back to assess where we are, conceptually, relative to where we need to be.

KR: An array of fantastic new molecular tools, from optogenetics to chemogenetics to in vivo dynamic imaging, has allowed a functional dissection of cells, molecules and pathways that underscore threat processing and inhibition. Understanding these processes will provide novel and robust insights into control of specific kinds of emotional responses, in particular fear and threat. From a translational perspective, such a cellular level of precision of behavioral control leads to remarkable possibilities. Through single-cell RNA-sequencing, we can now assess whether cell types and microcircuits are conserved from mouse to human. Furthermore, we can ask whether these conserved pathways also share molecular targets, so that one could apply data analytics and bioinformatics toward understanding combinations of drugs that might specifically inhibit conserved fear circuits or enhance extinction circuits. For example, even in humans, could we use brain stimulation techniques or even gene therapy to target fear circuits in reliable, therapeutic ways?

Concluding remarks

After this discussion, can we agree on a definition of fear?

RA: I think we want to be careful to leave room open for revision and discovery, rather than rigidly ‘defining’ fear. Perhaps we could agree on these points: (i) fear involves particular regions of the brain, especially clearly subcortical ones. We can measure it from, and induce it by manipulating, particular neural circuits (for example, the amygdala) and not others (for example, the cerebellum). Whether these circuits are specific to fear is a further empirical matter. We could come up with some initial inventory of how strong the evidence is for the participation of particular brain structures in fear. (ii) There are subtypes, varieties or dimensions of fear. I would advocate, in the first instance, for differentiating it based on functional criteria. We could come up with lists here, too. (iii) The state of fear, the conscious experience of fear, the concept of what ‘fear’ means and the meaning of the word ‘fear’ are all different things (the latter two can only be studied in humans). If you give people words or stories to rate, you are testing the last two. It would be useful to come up with taxonomy or a glossary for this.

MF : Several of the approaches (Aldolphs, Ressler, Tye and Fanselow) seem to take evolutionary concerns and commonalities between fear expression as central. Importantly, these approaches recognize that something can be learned from all measures of fear. LeDoux and Feldman Barrett stand apart. In my opinion, their approaches suffer from the human tendency to glorify verbal report over all other measures. So, the hurdle is to agree to treat verbal report as informative, but not exclusively so. LeDoux’s description of the circuitry supporting conscious reporting of fear recognizes that there is significant input from the amygdala and other components of the antipredator system. I believe this is also true of Feldman Barrett’s description, although she does not discuss explicit circuitry. The circuitry that gives rise to any individual fear response will have two components. One component arises from the core defensive circuit, and this will be similar for all fear responses. But there will also be a second component providing specific information, and the processing necessary, for execution of the particular response. This is just as true of freezing as verbal report. Each response will have its own unique subcircuit, part of which will belong to an essential circuitry common to all fear responses. Each response reflects both fear and other contextual information. If we recognize this, then we may be close to consensus. Even something seemingly simple as freezing is a complex construction. The firing of basolateral amygdala neurons that initiates freezing is brief and transient and needs to be converted elsewhere into the firing patterns necessary to maintain a sustained motor response. The motor pattern we call freezing varies considerably in posture; the freezing rat can be crouching on the ground or rearing up and leaning on a wall. This is remarkably similar to Feldman Barrett’s description of ‘many to one’ response mapping where the ‘intention’ to freeze is implemented by different motor plans. Freezing does not occur in random places: animals preferentially freeze near walls, in corners and in dark locations. Thus, the freezing subcircuit processes visual contextual information that is quite separate from the sensory stimuli that signal danger. Past experiences will also influence current action. These multiple streams of information must coalesce in a manner that supports each instance of freezing. Thus, even freezing is, in Feldman Barrett’s words, “highly context-dependent and variable.” Maybe we are not so far apart after all.

LFB : I am optimistic and hopeful that scientists can reach agreement on defining fear, but it will require that we reconsider some of our ontological commitments and the philosophical assumptions that ground our empirical inquiry. Several of the debates within the science of fear (and the science of emotion, more generally) are philosophical rather than scientific and so are unlikely to be resolved with experiments or data. Still, discussions like these are worth having, because commitments and assumptions are conceptual tools that influence (and constrain) the process and products of scientific inquiry.

JL: The fundamental issue we are discussing is the role of subjective experience in the science of emotion. Is it one of many aspects of emotion, or is it what emotion is all about? This is a perennial issue in emotion theory. The reason we are discussing this as if it was a novel topic here is because much contemporary research on the brain mechanisms of fear has involved fear conditioning, which has largely been isolated from mainstream emotion theory. My PhD dissertation in the late 1970s included studies of emotional consciousness in split-brain patients and introduced me to the cognitive theory of emotion. Ever since, I have viewed emotions as cognitively assembled states and tried to integrate cognitive thinking about emotion into the ‘fear’ conditioning (or what I call ‘threat conditioning’) field. But it has been an uphill battle. For example, sometime in the late 1980s, one of my colleagues from the behaviorist tradition asked me, “why do you talk about fear conditioning in terms of emotion?” These days, for better or worse, emotion talk is fairly common in the animal aversive conditioning field. But the conception of emotion is often still heavily influenced by the Miller–Mowrer behaviorist ‘fear theory’ from the 1940s, which treated conditioned ‘fear’ as the underlying factor in avoidance. While some from the behaviorist tradition, especially in the tradition of Tolman, viewed fear in animals as an intervening varaiable, a hypothetical ‘central state’ (for example, a hypothetical nonsubjective psychologicial or physiological state) that might connect stimuli with behavior, others viewed it as a subjective conscious experience; however, most did not take a stand either way, which has engendered much confusion. Research on the brain mechanisms of fear in humans has also often used the term ‘fear’ in ways that conflate behavioral and physiological responses with subjective experiences, further adding to the confusing state of affairs in which now find ourselves. As I noted above, some of the disagreements among the participants in this discussion are mostly semantic. But, also as noted, semantics are crucial to our conceptions and assumptions. It’s a good thing that different ideas are being expressed. Fear has too long been talked about in ways that imply we all mean the same thing. Now that different conceptions are being openly discussed, it would, as I suggested above, be useful for researchers to be more rigorous and vigilant in defining what each means by ‘fear’ each and every time the term is used, so that others will understand what is being referred to in a given instance. The less cumbersome alternative, which I prefer, is simply to confine fear to fear itself. As the social psychologist Matthew Lieberman recently argued, “emotion is emotional experience”. More generally, mental state terms like fear should be used to refer to mental states and not to behavioral or physiological control circuits.

KR: I believe that we can agree on a definition. I think most everyone already states some of the shared understanding of a subset of the conscious awareness components in humans, as well as observable physiological and behavioral components in humans and model systems. I think that separating the salience, valence and action (or perhaps feeling, perception and behavior) descriptions will help with some of the semantics. Additionally, I think that focusing on pragmatism over theoretical will help with efficiency toward a workable definition.

In your view, what are the clinical implications of a clear definition of fear?

RA: The clinical implications are huge. Probably the best evidence for this is the paper by LeDoux and Pine, and subsequent rebuttals by Fanselow. LeDoux and Pine argue that the effects of anxiolytic drugs studied in rodents do not inform about the conscious experience of fear and that this is why anxiolytic drugs don’t work well for alleviating fear in humans: they are aiming at the wrong target. For instance, an antidepressant that makes depressed people really awake and active and gets them out of bed in the morning would not be helpful if they still feel depressed. This is just one example, but it shows how important it is to figure out what we are studying when we study fear in animals and in humans and when we measure or manipulate its neural components.

MF: The scientific definition of fear must help us understand the clinical manifestations of fear. Let’s start with what I see as the two big questions. First, why are anxiety disorders so prevalent? Elsewhere I’ve described this as a natural and predicted consequence of the costs and benefits of hits vs. misses when assessing the presence of threat. Second, why are anxiety disorders so detrimental? Fear, anxiety and panic in the absence of actual danger are not beneficial, so why doesn’t the realization of this fact make anxiety disorders disappear? I believe this is a consequence of engaging a system whose strategies are determined by contingencies that operated over phylogeny rather than ontogeny. I also come back to my point that if consciousness evolved to allow flexible and rational decision making, the lack of flexibility and rational action that characterizes anxiety disorders suggests that conscious contributions are limited. I’m not saying that there is no contribution, but we must temper our conclusions with the facts of the clinical situation.

LFB: One goal of understanding the neurobiological basis of fear is to aid the treatment and prevention of mood-related symptoms in both mental and physical disorders. This goal will be accomplished only when we consider the mechanisms and features of fear in the context of what the broader range of evidence actually suggests about the evolution and development of the nervous system. An evo-devo approach requires considering what the broader range of evidence actually suggests about features of the human nervous system that are deeply evolutionarily conserved vs. features that emerge during human vs non-human brain development. In addition, scientists should understand that disorders which strongly implicate fear and/or anxiety, such as PTSD, are not specific ‘fear’ disorders; this has implications for how these disorders are understood, treated and prevented.

JL: In the face of a sudden danger, we typically consciously experience fear and also respond behaviorally and physiologically. Because the experience and the responses often occur simultaneously, we have the sense that they are entwined in the brain and thus are all consequences of a fear module. This is a common and popular view of fear, and it has led to search for medications and behavioral treatments that will relieve subjective distress in patients suffering from fear or anxiety disorders. Since the behavioral and subjective responses are both assumed to be products of a fear module, it is also assumed that treatments that alter behavior in animals will alter fear and anxiety in people. Few would claim that this effort has been a rousing success. Small but statistically significant differences relative to placebo controls are found in some studies, but for any one individual the chances of successful treatment are much lower than desirable. And even when successful, side effects pose other problems. But more pertinent to our concern here is why these treatments help, when they do. Is it because the treatment directly changes the content of the subjective experience, or because it indirectly affects the experience (for example, by reducing brain arousal, feedback from body responses), or because it affects cognitive processes that contribute to the experience (episodic and semantic memory; hierarchical deliberation, working memory, self-awareness), or all of the above? For the patient it probably doesn’t matter how a treatment works, but for the purpose of finding new and better medications, knowing the underlying mechanism of action is crucial. And to understand this we need a conceptualization of not just how the brain controls behavioral and physiological responses elicited by threats, but also how the threat engenders the conscious experience of fear—something that can only be explored in humans. After many decades of being marginalized as ‘just another measure of fear’, there is renewed interest in consciousness (including emotional consciousness) in psychology, neuroscience and the various psychotherapeutic communities—not simply because subjective experience is an interesting research topic, but also because it plays a central role in our lives and must be a central part of therapy.

KR: Disorders of fear processing (and related panic and anxiety), from panic disorder, social anxiety and phobia to PTSD, are among the most common of psychiatric maladies, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Combined, they are also among the highest in terms of morbidity, loss of work, comorbid psychiatric and medical disorders, and mortality from suicide. Despite these unfortunate statistics, we understand these disorders moderately well and have reasonable treatments. These disorders all share the core emotion of fear and threat-related symptoms. The diagnosis of a panic attack, shared among all of these disorders, includes racing heartbeat, sweats, chest pains, breathing difficulties, feelings of loss of control and a sense of terror, fear, impending doom and death—basically the ‘fear reflex’ run amok! The reflexes and symptoms that are ‘normal’ in a threatening situation are experienced by those with anxiety disorders all the time—as if they can’t ‘turn off’ the fear switch. Furthermore, the most well-supported, empirically validated treatments for these disorders rely on repeated exposure, now understood as the process of ‘fear extinction’. Advances in our understanding of mechanisms of fear and threat-processing, its underlying neural circuitry and molecular biology, and improved methods of fear inhibition and extinction, will contribute to advancing treatment and prevention for these devastating disorders.

What is an important gap that future research (and funding) should try to fill?

RA: Integrative, cross-species research. Right now, research on fear (and other emotions) is like the blind men and the elephant. Each lab studies either humans or a single animal model, and each study focuses on a narrow aspect of fear. We need to figure out how to put all this together. I’m not suggesting a giant project where all manner of species and humans are studied, but we should produce standardized sets of experimental protocols that the scientific community can use—in particular, these protocols and their measures have to cut across species to some extent. Right now, research on fear in animals and in humans is really disconnected, and that has to change if we are to make progress. We need uniform criteria for evaluating papers and grants and for building a cumulative science of fear. Needless to say, the by-now-common criteria of reproducibility and data sharing should apply also.

MF: Current technical developments in neuroscience are both important and breathtaking, but where we fall short is conceptual development and advancing formal theories of behavior. Without conceptual development, the data being collected with those tools can be, and often is, profoundly misinterpreted. While some of the contributors to this discussion bemoan the influence of behaviorism, I feel that a far more problematic trend is the intuitive, and often anthropomorphic, approach to behavior that characterizes much of the most technically advanced neuroscience going on now. This caution was a major motivator for the initial development of behaviorism. Again, I note that the negative comments regarding behaviorism above were directed at an outdated form of behaviorism that learning theorists discarded decades ago, and these comments can therefore be considered strawman arguments. Behavior is of paramount importance, not only because it allows objective observation, but also because it is where the organism connects with selection pressure. Careful observation of emotionally charged animals shows that behavior is often irrational and our intuitions about how to interpret it are likely to fail. I call ‘predatory imminence theory’ a functional behavioristic approach because its ideas flow from concerns about both evolution and behavioral topography.

LFB: Every behavior is the result of an economic decision about an animal’s global energy budget and involves estimating expenditures and deposits over various temporal windows that are relevant to the niche of the animal, taking into account the animal’s current physiological condition. If fear is to be understood in an evolutionary and developmental context, then it must be studied in the reality of those economic decisions as they emerge in an animal’s ethological context. More attention must be paid to basic metabolism and energy regulation, including the cellular respiration of neurons and glial cells. A predictive processing approach, rather than a stimulus–response approach, must also be considered. And a greater emphasis on variation and degeneracy, at all levels of analysis, as well as neural reuse, must be considered.

JL: My view is that the biggest impediments to progress are our conceptions and the language we use to characterize psychological constructs. My personal preference is that mental-state terms, such as fear, should be avoided when discussing relatively primitive processes that control behavior; mental state words should only be used when specifically referring to mental states, such as the conscious experience of fear.

KR: I agree with Tye that “given its critical importance in survival and its authoritarian command over the rest of the brain, fear should be one of the most extensively studied topics in neuroscience, though it trails behind investigation of sensory and motor processes due to its subjective nature.” I feel that it is among the ‘lowest hanging’ fruit in behavioral and translational neuroscience, and that an explanatory science—from molecules to cells to circuits to behavior—will provide a transformative example for other areas of neuroscience and neuropsychiatry. I think current gaps include many of the questions raised in this discussion, such as how are valence, salience, perception and action separated at a neural circuit level. Are there critical differences between predatory vs. social survival circuits and between reactive vs. cognitive fears? How discrete, at a cellular circuit and microcircuit level, are the different components and behaviors underlying threat processing? Finally, from a translational perspective, how are the molecules, cells and circuits conserved in humans—which ones constitute convergent evolution of similar behaviors with distinct mechanisms vs. which represent truly conserved mechanisms that are essentially the same in rodents and humans?

KT: The field would benefit greatly from additional paradigms that are distinct yet stereotyped to facilitate the same critical mass of research surrounding it that Pavlovian fear conditioning has undergone to really be able to make comparisons.

Substantial progress has been made in our understanding of the neural circuits involved in fear. This has been a cross-species endeavor, yet—as debated here—there are disparities on how to investigate and define fear. We hope that the debate presented here, which represents the views of a subset of outstanding researchers in the field, will invigorate the community to unify on clear definitions of fear (and its subtypes) and to show the courage to pursue new behavioral assays that can better differentiate between fear circuits (or concepts) involved in perception, feeling and action. The implications will be far-reaching, as a lack of coherence on what neural systems are involved in fear and fear learning will hinder scientific progress, including the study of human affective disorders such as PTSD, anxiety and panic disorder. That is, how we define fear determines how we investigate this emotion.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 22, 2019.

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The Allure of Fear

Fear: A Personal Essay on the Allure Of

Fear, a powerful and primitive human emotion, has long been the subject of fascination and dread. It is an emotion that can grip us with an overwhelming sense of unease, yet it also possesses a strange allure that draws us in, compelling us to confront the very things that terrify us. In this personal essay, I aim to explore the enigmatic allure of fear, delving into its complexities and the impact it has had on my own life.

The allure of fear is deeply rooted in its ability to provoke a wide range of emotions within us. When we experience fear, our bodies are flooded with adrenaline, our senses become heightened, and our instincts go into overdrive. This heightened state of awareness can be both exhilarating and terrifying, creating a paradoxical mix of emotions that is undeniably captivating. The rush of adrenaline that fear brings can be addictive, leading us to seek out increasingly intense experiences in order to recapture that same sense of exhilaration.

Furthermore, fear has the unique ability to reveal the depths of our own courage and resilience. When confronted with our greatest fears, we are forced to confront our own limitations and push beyond them. This process of facing our fears head-on can be transformative, leading to personal growth and a deepened understanding of ourselves. The allure of fear lies in its capacity to serve as a crucible for our inner strength, challenging us to rise to the occasion and emerge stronger than before.

In my own life, the allure of fear has been a constant presence, shaping many of my most significant experiences. From the exhilaration of conquering a lifelong fear of heights to the paralyzing dread of facing personal demons, fear has been a catalyst for both personal growth and profound introspection. The allure of fear has led me to confront my own vulnerabilities and emerge with a newfound sense of courage and resilience. It has pushed me to step outside of my comfort zone, embrace the unknown, and ultimately, discover the depths of my own strength.

In conclusion, fear is a complex and enigmatic emotion that holds a powerful allure over the human psyche. Its ability to evoke a wide range of emotions, reveal our inner strength, and push us to confront our deepest fears makes it a force to be reckoned with. While fear may be daunting and unsettling, its allure lies in its capacity to inspire personal growth, self-discovery, and the unearthing of our own courage. As I continue to navigate the myriad challenges and triumphs of life, I find myself drawn to the allure of fear, recognizing it as a powerful catalyst for transformation and self-discovery.

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Fears Vs. Phobias, And When Does A Fear Become A Phobia

Fears Vs Phobias And When Does A Fear and phobia are two terms often used interchangeably, but they have distinct differences. Understanding these differences can shed light on the human psyche and help us navigate our emotions more effectively. In this essay, we will delve into the definition of fears and phobias, explore their origins, and discuss when a fear becomes a phobia. To begin with, fears are a natural part of being human. They are emotional responses to perceived threats or dangers. Fears can be rational and have a specific trigger, such as a fear of heights or spiders. They serve as a protective mechanism, helping us stay alert and avoid potential harm. For example, the fear of crossing a busy road prompts us to be cautious and look both ways before stepping onto the street. On the other hand, phobias are intense and irrational fears that can significantly impact a person's daily life. Unlike fears, phobias are not necessarily based on real threats. They are often characterized by an overwhelming and uncontrollable anxiety response. Phobias can manifest in various forms, such as a fear of flying, enclosed spaces, or even harmless objects like buttons. Individuals with phobias may go to great lengths to avoid their triggers, leading to limitations in their personal and professional lives. The origins of fears and phobias can be traced back to a variety of factors. Fears are often learned through personal experiences or observations. For example, if someone had a traumatic encounter with a dog as a child, they may develop a fear of dogs. Phobias, on the other hand, can stem from a combination of genetic predisposition and life experiences. Studies have shown that a family history of phobias can increase the likelihood of developing one. Additionally, certain life events or traumas can trigger the onset of a phobia. So, when does a fear cross the line and become a phobia? While there is no specific threshold, a fear becomes a phobia when it causes significant distress and interferes with daily functioning. Phobias often lead to avoidance behaviors and can severely impact an individual's quality of life. For example, someone with a fear of public speaking may experience intense anxiety and may go to great lengths to avoid situations that require them to speak in front of others. This fear becomes a phobia when it becomes a constant source of distress and impairs their ability to pursue their goals. In conclusion, fears and phobias are both emotions that serve different purposes. Fears are natural and can be rational responses to real threats, while phobias are intense and irrational fears that can significantly impact a person's life. Understanding the distinction between the two can help us navigate our emotions more effectively and seek appropriate support when needed. By recognizing the signs of a phobia, individuals can take steps towards overcoming their fears and reclaiming their lives....

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Phobia Is An Extreme Or Irrational Fear Of Or Morbid Fear?

Phobias, as defined by psychological experts, are extreme or irrational fears that can significantly impact an individual's daily life. These fears manifest in various forms and intensities, ranging from common fears like arachnophobia (fear of spiders) to more obscure phobias such as triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13). While some phobias may seem trivial to those who do not experience them, they are very real and can cause severe distress to the individuals who suffer from them. One of the defining characteristics of a phobia is its irrationality. Unlike normal fears that arise from rational concerns, phobias often stem from deep-seated anxieties that may have no logical basis. For example, someone with astraphobia (fear of thunder and lightning) may understand intellectually that thunderstorms pose minimal actual danger to them, yet they still experience overwhelming fear and anxiety during storms. This irrationality sets phobias apart from everyday fears and necessitates specialized treatment approaches to help individuals manage and overcome them. The impact of phobias on daily life can be profound. Individuals with severe phobias may go to great lengths to avoid encountering the object of their fear, which can lead to significant disruptions in their personal and professional lives. For instance, someone with agoraphobia (fear of open or public spaces) may become housebound, unable to leave their home without experiencing intense anxiety or panic attacks. This avoidance behavior can exacerbate feelings of isolation and loneliness, further deteriorating the individual's mental well-being. Treatment for phobias typically involves a combination of therapy techniques, including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and exposure therapy. CBT helps individuals identify and challenge the negative thought patterns underlying their phobia, while exposure therapy gradually exposes them to the feared object or situation in a controlled and supportive environment. Over time, this exposure allows individuals to confront their fears and develop coping mechanisms to manage their anxiety more effectively. In conclusion, phobia is indeed an extreme or irrational fear that can have significant repercussions on an individual's life. Despite their seemingly illogical nature, phobias are very real and can cause immense distress to those who experience them. However, with the right treatment and support, individuals can learn to overcome their phobias and regain control over their lives....

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Roosevelt's First Inaugural Speech On We Have Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

Roosevelt's First Inaugural Speech: A Call to National Unity and Resilience In his first inaugural speech, delivered on March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the nation amidst one of its most challenging periods, the Great Depression. With unemployment rates soaring and the economy in turmoil, Roosevelt's speech aimed to instill hope and confidence in the American people while outlining his plans to navigate the country through these trying times. His message centered on the need for unity, resilience, and bold action to tackle the daunting challenges facing the nation. Roosevelt began his speech by acknowledging the gravity of the situation, stating, "This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly." By doing so, he established a tone of sincerity and transparency, crucial for garnering trust and support from the public. He recognized the fear and uncertainty prevalent among Americans and reassured them that their government was fully aware of the severity of the crisis. Furthermore, Roosevelt emphasized the importance of unity and collective action in overcoming adversity. He famously declared, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," highlighting the detrimental effects of fear and pessimism on the nation's psyche and economy. By urging Americans to confront their fears head-on and stand united in the face of adversity, Roosevelt sought to mobilize public support for his ambitious agenda of reform and recovery. Central to Roosevelt's inaugural address was his call for bold and decisive government intervention to address the economic crisis. He outlined his New Deal policies, aimed at providing relief, recovery, and reform, including programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Roosevelt's speech laid the groundwork for his administration's unprecedented expansion of the federal government's role in the economy and society, marking a significant departure from previous laissez-faire approaches. In conclusion, Roosevelt's first inaugural speech stands as a powerful testament to his leadership during one of the darkest periods in American history. Through his message of unity, resilience, and decisive action, he inspired hope and confidence in the American people and set the stage for the transformative reforms of the New Deal era. His words continue to resonate today as a reminder of the resilience of the American spirit in the face of adversity....

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Fear And Fear In Arthur Miller's The Crucible

Fear is a powerful emotion that can drive individuals to act in irrational and destructive ways. In Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, fear plays a central role in the lives of the characters and the events that unfold in the town of Salem. The play explores the theme of fear and its consequences, highlighting the destructive power of mass hysteria and the dangers of unchecked authority. One of the main sources of fear in The Crucible is the fear of witchcraft. The play is set in Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 17th century, a time when the belief in witchcraft was widespread. The fear of witches and the devil permeates the town, leading to accusations and trials that result in the deaths of innocent people. The characters in the play are driven by their fear of being accused of witchcraft, and this fear leads them to make false accusations and betray their neighbors. Another source of fear in the play is the fear of authority. The town of Salem is governed by a theocratic government, where religious leaders hold immense power. The characters in the play fear the consequences of defying this authority, and this fear leads them to conform and participate in the witch trials. The fear of punishment and social ostracism drives the characters to act against their own conscience and betray their friends and loved ones. The consequences of fear in The Crucible are devastating. Innocent people are accused and executed, families are torn apart, and the fabric of the community is destroyed. The play serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of fear and the importance of questioning authority. It highlights the need for individuals to stand up against injustice and to resist the temptation to conform to societal pressures. In conclusion, fear is a powerful force that can have destructive consequences. Arthur Miller's The Crucible explores the theme of fear and its consequences, highlighting the destructive power of mass hysteria and the dangers of unchecked authority. The play serves as a reminder of the importance of questioning authority and standing up against injustice. It is a powerful critique of the destructive nature of fear and a call to action for individuals to resist the temptation to conform and betray their own values....

Literature and Oral Traditions

Fear : A Short Story : Have No Fear

Fear: A Short Story In the dimly lit room, Sarah sat huddled in the corner, her heart pounding against her chest like a hammer against steel. She could hear the ominous creaking of the old house, each groan echoing through the silent night like a ghostly whisper. Outside, the wind howled like a wounded animal, rattling the windows in their frames. But it wasn't the storm that had Sarah trembling with fear; it was what lurked in the shadows, waiting to pounce. As she strained her ears, trying to discern any movement in the darkness, Sarah's mind raced with memories of past horrors. The nightmares that had plagued her since childhood seemed to come alive in the oppressive atmosphere of the old house. Every creak, every rustle, sent shivers down her spine, as if the very air itself was charged with malevolence. Suddenly, a floorboard creaked behind her, and Sarah's heart leaped into her throat. She spun around, her eyes wide with terror, but there was nothing there. Just the empty hallway, bathed in the sickly glow of the moonlight streaming through the windows. She tried to calm her racing heart, telling herself it was just her imagination running wild. But deep down, she knew there was something else in the house with her, something dark and sinister. With trembling hands, Sarah reached for the flashlight beside her, her fingers closing around the cold metal. She flicked it on, and the narrow beam of light cut through the darkness like a knife. Slowly, she rose to her feet, the floorboards creaking beneath her weight. She moved cautiously through the house, her senses on high alert, every shadow seeming to leap out at her like a hidden threat. But as she searched the empty rooms, her fear began to ebb away, replaced by a growing sense of determination. She refused to be paralyzed by her terror any longer. She would confront whatever lurked in the shadows, face her fears head-on, and emerge victorious. And so, with her heart pounding in her chest and her hands trembling with adrenaline, Sarah pressed on into the darkness, ready to confront the unknown. For she knew that true courage was not the absence of fear, but the willingness to face it, no matter how terrifying it may be. And in that moment, she was fearless....

Educational System
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Fears Of Dying Throughout John Keats ' When I Have Fears

"Fears of Dying Throughout John Keats' Works" The fear of dying is a recurring theme in the works of John Keats, one of the most influential poets of the Romantic era. Throughout his poetry, Keats grapples with the idea of mortality, reflecting on the transience of life and the inevitability of death. This theme is particularly prominent in his famous odes such as "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on Melancholy," and "To Autumn," where he explores the beauty and melancholy of life, often in the context of its fleeting nature. In "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats expresses a longing for escape from the harsh realities of life and the fleeting nature of human existence. The nightingale, a symbol of immortality and transcendence, becomes a source of solace for the poet as he grapples with the fear of mortality. The poem reflects Keats' desire to find respite from the fear of death and to seek a connection with something eternal and unchanging. Similarly, in "Ode on Melancholy," Keats delves into the complexities of human emotions, including the fear of mortality. He acknowledges that pain and sorrow are inevitable parts of life, and that the fear of death is intertwined with the experience of joy and beauty. The poem serves as a meditation on the transience of happiness and the inevitability of loss, encapsulating Keats' preoccupation with the ephemeral nature of life. In "To Autumn," Keats celebrates the beauty of the season while subtly addressing the theme of mortality. The poem captures the richness of life and the passage of time, evoking a sense of nostalgia and contemplation. Through vivid imagery and sensory details, Keats invites the reader to embrace the fleeting moments of life and to come to terms with the fear of dying as an intrinsic part of the human experience. In conclusion, the fear of dying is a profound and recurrent theme in John Keats' poetry. Through his exploration of beauty, melancholy, and the passage of time, Keats offers a poignant reflection on the human condition and the inevitability of mortality. His works continue to resonate with readers, inviting them to confront their own fears of dying and to find solace in the enduring power of art and beauty....

History of the United States

Fear : The Power Of Fear In Gothic Literature

Fear: The Power of Fear in Gothic Literature Gothic literature is renowned for its exploration of the human psyche, often delving into the darkest recesses of fear and terror. At the heart of many Gothic tales lies the omnipresent theme of fear, which serves as a powerful tool for authors to captivate readers and evoke visceral emotions. Through intricate narratives and haunting imagery, Gothic writers wield fear as a potent force, weaving it into the fabric of their stories to create chilling atmospheres and spine-tingling suspense. One of the most compelling aspects of fear in Gothic literature is its ability to manifest in various forms, ranging from the supernatural to the psychological. From ghostly apparitions and malevolent spirits to the psychological torment of guilt and madness, fear permeates every aspect of the Gothic narrative, ensnaring both characters and readers alike in its suffocating grip. In works such as Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," fear takes on a psychological dimension, as protagonists grapple with their own inner demons, driving them to the brink of madness. Furthermore, fear in Gothic literature often serves as a reflection of societal anxieties and cultural tensions. Through the exploration of taboo subjects such as death, decay, and the unknown, Gothic writers confront the darker aspects of human existence, challenging readers to confront their deepest fears and anxieties. In Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," for example, fear of the unknown and the consequences of scientific hubris are central themes, as Victor Frankenstein's reckless pursuit of knowledge leads to tragic consequences beyond his control. Moreover, Gothic literature frequently employs fear as a means of subverting traditional power dynamics and challenging established norms. By portraying marginalized characters as agents of fear or supernatural entities, Gothic writers destabilize the status quo, disrupting conventional notions of power and authority. In Bram Stoker's "Dracula," for instance, the titular vampire embodies the fear of the Other, preying upon the fears and vulnerabilities of Victorian society, while simultaneously challenging prevailing notions of sexuality and gender roles. In conclusion, fear is a central and pervasive theme in Gothic literature, serving as both a narrative device and a reflection of deeper existential anxieties. From its ability to evoke visceral terror to its exploration of psychological torment and societal taboos, fear permeates every aspect of the Gothic narrative, leaving an indelible mark on both characters and readers alike. Through the power of fear, Gothic writers captivate audiences, drawing them into the dark and macabre worlds they create, where the line between reality and nightmare blurs, and the shadows hold untold horrors....

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If people didn’t feel fear, they wouldn’t be able to protect themselves from legitimate threats. Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger that has been pivotal throughout human evolution, but especially in ancient times when men and women regularly faced life-or-death situations.

Today, the stakes are lower, but while public speaking , elevators, and spiders don’t present the same type of immediately dire consequences that faced early man, some individuals still develop extreme fight-flight-or-freeze responses to specific objects or scenarios.

Many people experience occasional bouts of fear or “nerves” before a flight, first date, or big game. But when someone’s fear is persistent and specific to certain threat, and impairs his or her everyday life, that person might have what’s known as a specific phobia.

Why People Feel Fear
Specific Phobias
Social Anxiety
Overcoming Fear

At least 60 percent of adults admit to having at least one unreasonable fear, although research to date is not clear on why these fears manifest. One theory is that humans have a genetic predisposition to fear things that were a threat to our ancestors, such as snakes, spiders, heights, or water, but this is difficult to verify, although people who have a first-degree relative with a specific phobia appear more likely to have the same one. Others point to evidence that individuals fear certain things because of a previous traumatic experience with them, but that fails to explain the many fears without such origins.

Personality traits such as neuroticism appear to increase one's likelihood of developing a phobia, and a tendency toward frequent worries and negative thoughts may also increase the risk, as may being raised by overprotective parents, losing a parent, or sexual or physical abuse. Most likely is that people follow multiple pathways to fears , not least among them the emotional response of disgust.

Throughout human history, certain animals, such as snakes and spiders, have caused high numbers of deaths. Thus, some researchers believe, men and women may have evolved to carry an innate instinct to avoid such creatures, as it would deliver a survival advantage. Some studies have shown that it’s easier to condition people without apparent fears of any animals to fear snakes and spiders than to fear dogs or other “friendly” creatures. Studies of other primates show that they share humans’ fear of snakes , leading some to speculate that such fears themselves may have spurred the growth of primate intelligence overall, as humans and others evolved to avoid the dangers posed by such threats.

Research shows that babies do not appear to show signs of fear until around 8 to 12 months of age, usually in response to new people or events, but they are less likely to show a fear of strangers when sitting on a parent’s lap. And while some fears may be innate in humans, many fears are learned , perhaps most commonly by seeing a parent react fearfully to an animal or situation, or to frequently warn a child about its dangers.

There are times when people actively pursue experiences that could scare them, like a roller coaster or a haunted house attraction . Some research suggests that even though these experiences can be truly frightening in the moment, they may also boost people’s moods: The scare response is sincere, but the quick reassurance of safety delivers an equally strong jolt of relief and enjoyment that may linger well after the experience.

Some feelings commonly described as “fears” are not strictly phobias, but mental obstacles that limit people’s actions and decisions, often preventing them from making progress, such as the fear of failure , the fear of success, the fear of rejection , the fear of missing out, or the fear of commitment. These feelings of insecurity, unworthiness, or indecision can often be addressed in therapy .

A phobia is a distinct fear or anxiety about a certain object or situation, exposure to which consistently provokes fear or causes distress in the sufferer. The fear experienced is almost always disproportionate to the true danger the object or event poses, and people with specific phobias generally know there is no real reason to be afraid and that their behavior is not logical. However, they cannot avoid their reaction.

Phobias fall into five broad categories:

Fears of animals, such as fear of dogs (cynophobia), spiders (arachnophobia), or bugs ( insectophobia or entomophobia) . These fears, known as zoophobias, also include the fear of bats ( chiroptophobia) and of snakes or lizards (herpetophobia).
Fears of the natural environment, such as a fear of heights (acrophobia) or of storms. These phobias also include fear of fire ( pyrophobia) and fear of the dark (nyctophobia).
Fears related to blood ( hemophobia) , injury, and injection, such as a fear of needles ( trypanophobia) or medical procedures including dentistry ( dentophobia).
Situational fears, such as a fear of flying ( aerophobia), a fear of public speaking (glossophobia) , or a fear of riding in elevators, which is itself a type of fear of closed spaces ( claustrophobia).
Others, such as a fear of vomiting or choking.

Phobias can manifest at any time, but tend to emerge in childhood or adolescence , and the symptoms are often lifelong. In some cases, exposure to the feared object or situation (the phobic stimulus) can cause full or limited panic attacks. As many as 9 percent of Americans annually experience a specific phobia, according to the DSM-5 , and women are twice as likely as men to have a phobia. It’s not uncommon to have multiple phobias: three-quarters of individuals diagnosed with a specific phobia have more than one and the average sufferer has three. The onset of a phobia can sometimes be traced to a specific event, like surviving a plane crash or being attacked by a dog. But for many more people, the origin of the phobia remains unknown. Some people with a specific phobia change their lifestyles to avoid their triggers, moving to a region where certain animals are rare, for example, or where there is no subway.

To learn more about causes and treatments, see our Diagnosis Dictionary .

Agoraphobia is the fear of situations that would be difficult to escape from or from which it would be difficult to get help, such as being in a movie theater or subway car. People with agoraphobia may fear public transportation, open spaces such as bridges, enclosed spaces like elevators, crowded places like concerts, and being away from home in general. Sufferers may become highly distressed when they find themselves in such situations and will go out of their way to avoid them.

Fear of heights is a common phobia, and one that is often experienced intensely. In fact, the symptoms often mirror those of a panic attack, including trembling, sweaty palms, nausea, and dizziness. Some have this phobia because of a traumatic experience but research suggests that, for many others, this fear, and similar ones such as claustrophobia, is a consequence of being more acutely aware of their bodily sensations than others, and more likely to interpret those sensations as threatening, leading to negative thoughts about jumping, losing their balance, or having a heart attack.

It’s often stated that the fear of public speaking is the most common phobia. It isn’t; only about one in four people report experiencing it. But when those with glossophobia are asked to speak before a group, the fear can be paralyzing. People who generally experience high levels of anxiety may worry not only that their speech will be ineffective but that their anxiety will somehow undermine their performance. For others, there are plenty of other sources of discomfort, such as feeling unqualified to speak with expertise, worrying about being evaluated by higher-status colleagues, and, quite commonly, overestimating the stakes of their performance.

Preparation, practice, support from others, and learning to put oneself in a calmer, more relaxed state can all help ease the fear of public speaking , but one of the most important steps people can take is to challenge their beliefs. Cognitive reframing of one’s worries—challenging beliefs about being boring , anxious, or uninformed and replacing them with more favorable, supportive, and, significantly, realistic statements can help someone gain confidence and more accurately perceive the level of threat.

Clown-like characters have been a part of popular culture for centuries. Yet some people have always found them creepy, and about 2 percent of the population experiences coulrophobia, or a fear of clowns . The reaction may be due not just to news reports of crimes by people in clown masks or makeup, but to the ambiguity that even harmless clowns present. With painted-on, unchanging expressions, clowns’ emotions can be hard to read and their intentions may seem unpredictable. The phenomenon known as deindividuation, leads to further unease: Since the identities of the men or women behind the makeup are hidden, others may become fearful of what they might do under cover of anonymity.

Tokophobia, or the fear of pregnancy and/or childbirth, is a longtime phobia but one that has only recently been seriously researched. It affects both women who have experienced pregnancy and those who have not. Sufferers can experience terror, panic, or intense disgust at the very idea of becoming pregnant, leading to difficulty in forming romantic relationships and depriving women of the family they sincerely desire to have. (Women who simply do not desire children do not have tokophobia.)

Nomophobia is a recently coined fear, with “nomo” standing in for “no mobile.” Researchers who have observed individuals experience intense anxiety, fear, or withdrawal when separated from their mobile phones (or even from mobile phone reception) believe the response is based on the devices’ primary function as a means of connection with close attachments like friends, partners, and relatives, and their role as “human attachment substitutes” because they carry photos, messages, and other cherished personal information.

Fear often takes forms other than specific phobias. For example, social anxiety disorder , which is also known as social phobia, entails a deep fear of other people’s judgment, evaluation, and rejection that limits sufferers’ enjoyment of life. Individuals with social anxiety may avoid situations in which they will be exposed to the scrutiny of others, such as giving a speech, eating in front of others, meeting new people, or engaging in group conversations.

To learn more, see Types of Anxiety.

No, but social anxiety can lead to depression , and vice versa. People who experience social anxiety may endure extreme unhappiness, self-doubt, and even hopelessness, symptoms which overlap with those of depression. But research on the two conditions reveals a core feeling of worthlessness, or feeling that one is undeserving, whether of happiness or of other people’s friendship . Addressing that symptom in therapy could help to address social anxiety before it triggers depression.

The techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy may help sufferers begin to overcome social anxiety . Practicing approaches to social situations through limited exposure, and beginning to question the internal stories that lead them to avoid others, can foster confidence in sufferers they are in fact the type of people who can handle social situations. Testing predictions that things will go wrong, to prove that they are incorrect, can further help people challenge anxious thoughts, as can learning to credit or reward themselves for steps toward socializing, as opposed to criticizing themselves unrealistically in post-mortems.

To learn more, see Social Anxiety Disorder.

When fear disrupts or overtakes an individual's life, therapy can help. A core treatment for fears is exposure therapy, in which a therapist guides the client to gradually and repeatedly engage with the source of their phobia in a safe environment to help strip away the threat associated with it. For example, someone with a fear of flying may be prompted to think about planes, view pictures of planes, visit the airport, step onto a plane, and eventually complete a flight. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is often applied in combination with exposure therapy, to help sufferers challenge and reframe their harmful beliefs.

Medication such as beta-blockers, which block adrenaline and lower heart rate and blood pressure, may be prescribed in the short-term, often when a feared situation is necessary or unavoidable, such as before a public speaking commitment.

Minding one’s thoughts, acknowledging their fears, and being present can go a long way toward managing everyday fears . The first step is to question the story behind a fear. When one’s mental predictions insist that something will go wrong or that an individual faces imminent danger, the ability to step back, recognize those thoughts as stories, and calmly evaluate whether they are true or rational can be a powerful step toward overcoming them.

Using the technology of virtual reality to simulate exposure to fears has emerged as a useful therapeutic tool. Evidence suggests that Virtual Reality Graded Exposure Therapy (VRGET) can be especially helpful in addressing concerns like specific phobias , agoraphobia, and anxiety disorders . Patient outcomes appear to be no different in virtual and real settings, but VR may enable therapists to reach more people with accessible and affordable care.

No one lives without fear, but those individuals perceived as courageous may respond to and manage their fears in ways that may offer models to others. First, they are not afraid to be afraid , knowing it’s a feeling that is sometimes unavoidable, and that it’s a feeling that can be useful when it’s recognized as an alert and not a barrier. With this knowledge, they can prepare without panicking, take action instead of shying away from it, and ask for help when their fears clue them in that it may be needed.

Personal Perspective: In a world of fear and anger, each of us wants the same thing: to feel valued by others. By shifting the paradigm, we can help save the world.

If even the mere thought of death—yours or someone else's—causes panic or despair, you can get help.

Growing up too fast or too soon can impact you heavily, even in adulthood.

Gen X parents worry about crime happening to their children but often fear the wrong crimes, emphasizing stranger danger.

AI has risen so quickly and become so adept that some workers fear for their jobs. But the nature of work has always evolved and adapted as machines took over some tasks.

Subordinates have bent down to dominants since before the beginning of recorded time.

Research shows why witnessing political rudeness is bad for you. Here's what you can do about it.

These suggestions can help us determine when fear is providing important information and when it is instead constraining and dividing us.

Rumination, or "overthinking," is a hallmark of poor mental health and unhappiness. It is a psychological tendency that, if left unchecked, can reduce our enjoyment of life.

Instead of excitement about the upcoming election, most Americans are terrified of the “other side” winning. Here are tips on managing election anxiety, while staying informed.

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What is the allure of fear?

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“The allure of fear” is a sensation of fear and loving it. It appears when we watch horror movies such as films about a zombie, monsters, witchcraft, demons, slasher flicks, and supernatural chillers.

EXPLANATION:

Some people love the feeling of fear or being frightened. It is a sensation which makes them better . Experts agree with this statement because the feeling of fear causes body releases some good hormones of chemicals. When the body releases good chemicals, human thoughts will take a break and feel the enjoyment of the chemicals released. The allure of fear doesn’t come from the fear itself. It comes from the physical and emotional release that follows the scary feeling or situations.

When we experience fear from a horror movie or other situations, our body will release good hormones including oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin. These hormones or chemicals are considered as a sort of natural high. These are the “feel good” chemicals which are produced by human bodies. Thus, that is why some people love being frightened or scared because in a moment they will feel “happy”.

The hormones and neurotransmitters released by our body are helping us to prepare to flee or flight. At the same time, our attention is shifting away from abstract thoughts and focusing on issues of survival. This shifting sets the stage for a feeling of escapism. Our thoughts can take a break from the ‘reality’ and enjoy being fully in the body, feeling animal and primal. For example, when we watch a horror movie and we feel scared, we don’t think about classes, grades, relationship, or even the future. We just enjoy being ourselves at that moment. Thus, that is why fear can be fun and attractive.

LEARN MORE:

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, we recommend you to also take a look at the following questions:

1. What causes Samuel's feelings to change from confusion and fear to anger and hate at the end of "Samuel's Memory"? brainly.com/question/8835005

KEYWORDS: allure of fear, what is the allure of fear, fear

Subject: English

Class: 10-12

Sub-chapter: Allure of fear

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6.1M people helped

The allure of fear is a complex and multifaceted concept that varies from person to person. While fear is generally considered a negative emotion, it also possesses a certain fascination and allure for many individuals.

Fear triggers the release of adrenaline and other stress hormones in our bodies, which can create a rush of excitement and heightened awareness.

Fear can evoke a sense of thrill and excitement that is absent in our everyday lives.

Some individuals may find the allure of fear appealing, others may actively avoid fear-inducing situations or have anxiety disorders that make fear highly unpleasant or distressing.

To learn more about the fear , follow the link:

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Fear of Failure — The Fear of Failure As My Biggest Failure in Life

Why My Biggest Fear is Failure

Categories: Failure Fear Fear of Failure

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Words: 595 |

Published: Sep 1, 2020

Words: 595 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing.
Duckworth, A. L. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner.
Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(6), 1087.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. Hogarth Press.
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
Pintrich, P. R., & Schunk, D. H. (2002). Motivation in Education: Theory, Research, and Applications (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
Seligman, M. E. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Atria Books.
Sweeny, K., & Duckworth, A. L. (2019). Failure as Fuel: A Self-Regulatory Approach. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(11), e12508.
Tice, D. M., & Bratslavsky, E. (2000). Giving in to feel good: The place of emotion regulation in the context of general self-control. Psychological Inquiry, 11(3), 149-159.

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What Is the Allure of Fear

1.1. Background and Significance

2. The Psychology of Fear

2.1. The Nature of Fear

2.2. The Role of Evolution

3. The Appeal of Fear in Entertainment

3.1. Horror Films and Video Games

4. Conclusion

4.1. Implications and Future Research

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What Is the Allure of Fear: Essay

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Why Do Some Brains Enjoy Fear?

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97 Fear Essay Topics & Examples

On the Nature of Fear

Q1: Dean Mobbs (moderator): How do you define fear and how is your definition supported by neuroscience?

Q2: How does your theory of fear separate neural circuits for feeling, perception and action?

Q3: Are there different defensive circuits (for example, predatory vs. social, survival circuits, reactive vs cognitive fears), and if so, are they orthogonal or synergistic? What is the evidence for your position?

Q4: How does (or can) your perspective fit with the others’ perspectives?

Q5: Do current behavioral assays for the study of fear restrict our ability to improve our understanding of fear?

Q6: Can animal models inform us about human models of fear (and vice versa)?

Q7: How can new technologies and methods enhance our understanding of fear?

Concluding remarks

The Allure of Fear

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Why My Biggest Fear is Failure

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