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The Psychology of Fear

Daniel B. Block, MD, is an award-winning, board-certified psychiatrist who operates a private practice in Pennsylvania.

Frederick Bass / Getty Images

According to psychology research, fear is a primal emotion that involves a universal biochemical response and a high individual emotional response. Fear alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological.

Sometimes fear stems from real threats, but it can also originate from imagined dangers. While fear is a natural response to some situations, it can also lead to distress and disruption when extreme or out of proportion to the actual threat.

Fear can also be a symptom of some mental health conditions, including panic disorder , social anxiety disorder, phobias , and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Fear is composed of two primary reactions to some type of perceived threat: biochemical and emotional.

Biochemical Reaction

Fear is a natural emotion and a survival mechanism. When we confront a perceived threat, our bodies respond in specific ways. Physical reactions to fear include sweating, increased heart rate, and high adrenaline levels that make us extremely alert.  

This physical response is also known as the “fight or flight” response , with which your body prepares itself to either enter combat or run away. This biochemical reaction is likely an evolutionary development. It's an automatic response that is crucial to our survival.

Emotional Response

The emotional response to fear, on the other hand, is highly personalized. Because fear involves some of the same chemical reactions in our brains that positive emotions like happiness and excitement do, feeling fear under certain circumstances can be seen as fun, like when you watch scary movies .

Some people are adrenaline seekers , thriving on extreme sports and other fear-inducing thrill situations. Others have a negative reaction to the feeling of fear, avoiding fear-inducing situations at all costs.

Although the physical reaction is the same, the experience of fear may be perceived as either positive or negative, depending on the person.

Symptoms of Fear

Fear often involves both physical and emotional symptoms. Each person may experience fear differently, but some of the common signs and symptoms include:

• Rapid heartbeat
• Shortness of breath
• Upset stomach

In addition to the physical symptoms of fear, people may experience psychological symptoms of being overwhelmed, upset, feeling out of control, or a sense of impending death.

Diagnosing Fear

Talk to your doctor if you are experiencing persistent and excessive feelings of fear. Your doctor may conduct a physical exam and perform lab tests to ensure that your fear and anxiety are not linked to an underlying medical condition.

Your doctor will also ask questions about your symptoms including how long you've been having them, their intensity, and situations that tend to trigger them. Depending on your symptoms, your doctor may diagnose you with a type of anxiety disorder, such as a phobia.

One aspect of anxiety disorders can be a tendency to develop a fear of fear. Where most people tend to experience fear only during a situation that is perceived as scary or threatening, those who live with anxiety disorders may become afraid that they will experience a fear response. They perceive their fear responses as negative and go out of their way to avoid those responses.

A phobia is a twisting of the normal fear response. The fear is directed toward an object or situation that does not present a real danger. Though you recognize that the fear is unreasonable, you can't help the reaction. Over time, the fear tends to worsen as the fear of fear response takes hold.

Causes of Fear

Fear is incredibly complex and there is no single, primary cause. Some fears may result from experiences or trauma, while others may represent a fear of something else entirely, such as a loss of control. Still, other fears may occur because they cause physical symptoms, such as being afraid of heights because they make you feel dizzy and sick to your stomach.

Some common fear triggers include:

• Certain specific objects or situations (spiders, snakes, heights, flying, etc)
• Future events
• Imagined events
• Real environmental dangers
• The unknown

Certain fears tend to be innate and may be evolutionarily influenced because they aid in survival. Others are learned and are connected to associations or traumatic experiences. 

Types of Fear

Some of the different types of anxiety disorders that are characterized by fear include:

• Agoraphobia
• Generalized anxiety disorder
• Panic disorder
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Separation anxiety disorder
• Social anxiety disorder
• Specific phobia

Treatment of Fear

Repeated exposure to similar situations leads to familiarity, which can dramatically reduce both the fear response. This approach forms the basis of some phobia treatments , which depend on slowly minimizing the fear response by making it feel familiar.  

Phobia treatments that are based on the psychology of fear tend to focus on techniques like systematic desensitization and flooding. Both techniques work with your body’s physiological and psychological responses to reduce fear.

Systematic Desensitization

Systematic desensitization involves being gradually led through a series of exposure situations. For example, if you have a fear of snakes, you may spend the first session with your therapist talking about snakes.

Slowly, over subsequent sessions, your therapist would lead you through looking at pictures of snakes, playing with toy snakes, and eventually handling a live snake. This is usually accompanied by learning and applying new coping techniques to manage the fear response.

This is a type of exposure technique that can be quite successful. Flooding based on the premise that your phobia is a learned behavior and you need to unlearn it.

With flooding, you are exposed to a vast quantity of the feared object or exposed to a feared situation for a prolonged amount of time in a safe, controlled environment until the fear diminishes. For instance, if you're afraid of planes, you'd go on up in one anyway.

The point is to get you past the overwhelming anxiety and potential panic to a place where you have to confront your fear and eventually realize that you're OK. This can help reinforce a positive reaction (you're not in danger) with a feared event (being in the sky on a plane), ultimately getting you past the fear.

While these treatments can be highly effective, it's important that such confrontational approaches be undertaken only with the guidance of a trained mental health professional.

Coping With Fear

There are also steps that you can take to help cope with fear in day to day life. Such strategies focus on managing the physical, emotional, and behavioral effects of fear. Some things you can do include:

• Get social support. Having supportive people in your life can help you manage your feelings of fear.
• Practice mindfulness. While you cannot always prevent certain emotions, being mindful can help you manage them and replace negative thoughts with more helpful ones.
• Use stress management techniques such as deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation , and visualization.
• Take care of your health. Eat well, get regular exercise, and get adequate sleep each night.

Press Play for Advice on Facing Your Fears

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares a strategy to help you find courage when you need it the most. Click below to listen now.

Follow Now : Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Google Podcasts

Fear is an important human emotion that can help protect you from danger and prepare you to take action, but it can also lead to longer-lasting feelings of anxiety. Findings ways to control your fear can help you better cope with these feelings and prevent anxiety from taking hold.

If you or a loved one are struggling with fears, phobias, or anxiety, contact the  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline  at 1-800-662-4357 for information on support and treatment facilities in your area.

For more mental health resources, see our  National Helpline Database .

Kozlowska K, Walker P, McLean L, Carrive P. Fear and the defense cascade: Clinical implications and management . Harv Rev Psychiatry . 2015;23(4):263-287. doi:10.1097/HRP.0000000000000065

Javanbakht A, Saab L. What Happens in the Brain When We Feel Fear . Smithsonian.

National Alliance on Mental Illness. Anxiety Disorders .

Adolphs R. The biology of fear . Curr Biol. 2013;23(2):R79-93. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.11.055

Craske MG, Treanor M, Conway CC, Zbozinek T, Vervliet B. Maximizing exposure therapy: An inhibitory learning approach .  Behav Res Ther . 2014;58:10–23. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2014.04.006

Samra CK, Abdijadid S. Specific Phobia . StatPearls Publishing.

By Lisa Fritscher Lisa Fritscher is a freelance writer and editor with a deep interest in phobias and other mental health topics.

The Psychology of Fear: Definition, Symptoms, Traits, Causes, Treatment

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Florence Yeung

Editor at Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons), Psychology, MSc, Clinical Mental Health Sciences

Florence Yeung is a certified Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner with three years of clinical experience in NHS primary mental health care. She is presently pursuing a ClinPsyD Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (HPFT). In her capacity as a trainee clinical psychologist, she engages in specialist placements, collaborating with diverse borough clinical groups and therapeutic orientations.

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

What Is Fear?

Fear is a natural and primitive emotion that can be experienced by everyone to some degree.

Fear is a basic, emotional response to a perceived threat or danger. It triggers the body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ response, leading to physiological changes like increased heart rate and adrenaline levels.

Fear is an essential survival mechanism, helping individuals react to potentially life-threatening situations. It can respond to immediate, tangible threats and more abstract or future concerns. Fear can also be learned through past experiences or observations.

People may experience fear when in situations such as walking home alone at night, facing animals they perceive as dangerous, or when about to skydive out of a plane.

Fear can also be attributed to feelings of stress and anxiety. It may also contribute to some feelings of disgust, as according to a study investigating those who feared or did not fear snakes, those who experienced this fear reported high feelings of disgust and fear (Rádlová et al., 2020).

Fear is a very natural human response that arises as a defense mechanism in the face of potential danger or harm. It can manifest in a variety of situations and is a normal part of the human experience.

However, when fear becomes extreme in certain situations, such as in social situations or towards a particular object, it may indicate a more significant issue.

In such cases, seeking professional help and support can be beneficial in managing and overcoming the fear.

Biochemical Reaction

Fear is a normal response to many situations and comprises two primary reactions: biochemical and emotional.

The biochemical reaction to fear causes our bodies to respond to perceived threats in the environment.

This produces automatic physical reactions such as sweating, increased heart rate, breathlessness, and dilated pupils. These bodily reactions prepare the body to either combat the threat or run away from it – this is called the ‘ fight or flight ’ response.

In response to a threat, the sympathetic nervous system , part of the autonomic nervous system, is activated by the sudden release of hormones.

The sympathetic nervous system then stimulates the adrenal glands to trigger the release of hormones, resulting in physical reactions. These hormones are:

• Epinephrine (adrenaline) – Provides energy to the major muscles of the body so they can respond to a perceived threat.
• Norepinephrine (noradrenaline) – increases alertness, arousal, and attention. Connstricts blood vessels that help maintain blood pressure during times of stress.

Emotional Response

The emotional response to fear, however, is personalized to the individual. Since the biology of fear involves some of the same chemical responses to pleasant emotions , such as excitement and happiness, people can experience either pleasant or unpleasant emotions to fear.

For instance, some people may enjoy riding extreme roller coasters, while others may have a negative reaction and will avoid these at all costs.

Although the biochemical reaction for fear may be the same, some people will experience the intensity of fearful situations differently than others.

Symptoms and diagnosis

People can experience fear differently, but some of the common physical and emotional symptoms are:

• Rapid heart rate
• Upset stomach
• Shortness of breath
• Feeling overwhelmed
• Feeling out of control
• A sense of impending death

For a condition associated with fear and anxiety to be diagnosed, the symptoms must be persistent, interfere with some part of normal functioning, and cannot be better explained by another condition.

If feelings of fear become persistent and excessive, this could be diagnosed as a type of anxiety disorder, depending on the symptoms being experienced.

Common disorders which are associated with fear are: phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, s ocial anxiety disorder , healthy anxiety disorder, panic disorder , and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Is fear useful?

In many situations, fear is normal and healthy in that it can keep us from entering harmful situations and help us decide when to get out of these situations.

The immediate threat of danger and the physical responses that come with it can help focus our attention and mobilize us to cope with the danger, but either fighting against it (fight) or running away from it (flight).

Fear may also help us to react to danger without having to think about it consciously.

For example, if a car is coming towards us, fear can make us jump out of the way and thus save our lives. Also, if humans have the capacity to notice fear in others since we recognize it in ourselves, we can offer compassion and reassurance to others to help them cope.

In contrast, extreme levels of fear could result in the development of mental health conditions such as phobias or other anxiety conditions. A phobia is an intense, persistent, and out of proportional fear of something, an event, or a situation.

Phobias twist the normal fear response into something difficult or impossible to control and can be detrimental to people’s lives. Likewise, other anxiety conditions, such as generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder , involve intense worry or fear of many things and social situations respectively.

The biochemical and emotional response to fear can be so extreme that it can negatively affect people’s lives. If fear gets too extreme, such as in those experiencing anxiety disorders, it can keep us trapped, preventing us from doing things we want.

Disorders That Involve Fear

Phobias may be diagnosed when certain situations, events, or objects create a strong, irrational fear. Some symptoms of phobias include:

A sensation of uncontrollable anxiety when exposed to the source of the fear.

The feeling that the source of the fear needs to be avoided at all costs.

Not being able to function properly when exposed to fear.

They may acknowledge that the fear is irrational and exaggerated, combined with the inability to control feelings of fear.

• Feeling incapable of coping with the fear.

Different types of phobias can be diagnosed: specific phobias, social phobias , and agoraphobia. Specific phobias are intense, irrational fears of a specific trigger.

Some common specific phobias are spiders and snakes. Social phobia is a profound fear of public humiliation or being judged negatively by others in social situations.

Agoraphobia is an intense fear of situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing) or in which help may not be available in the event of having an unexpected panic episode. This could be a fear of enclosed spaces, as well as open or crowded spaces.

Specific phobias are known as simple phobias since they can usually be linked to an identifiable cause and are unlikely to affect daily living as the person can avoid the trigger.

For instance, if someone has a phobia of heights, they are not likely to experience this fear day-to-day, only in situations where they may have to face their fear.

Social phobia (also known as social anxiety disorder) and agoraphobia, however, are known as complex phobias since their triggers are less easily recognizable or avoidable, and the individual is more likely to experience the associated fear more frequently than those with a specific phobia.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

PTSD is a mental health disorder that can develop in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, such as a serious accident, military combat, physical or sexual assault, or natural disaster.

One of the key symptoms of PTSD is experiencing intense fear, anxiety, or distress when confronted with reminders of the traumatic event, even if the present situation is not actually dangerous or threatening (Maren et al., 2013).

This fear response is thought to be related to the way the brain processes and encodes memories of the traumatic event. When someone experiences a traumatic event, the brain’s fear response is activated, causing the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

However, in people with PTSD, the brain’s fear response can become overactive and hyper-vigilant , causing them to perceive even minor cues in their environment as potential threats. For example, a veteran who experienced combat trauma might feel intense fear or panic when they hear a car backfire or fireworks, as these sounds could trigger memories of gunfire or explosions.

In essence, the fear response in people with PTSD is triggered by associations between present experiences and past traumatic events, rather than by a real and present danger.

These associations can be so strong that even subtle reminders of the trauma can trigger a full-blown fear response, leading to symptoms like panic attacks, hypervigilance, and avoidance behaviors.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)

Those who experience GAD typically have persistent and excessive worries about everyday life and worry about multiple things. They may be fearful about their health, finances, safety, and relationships, etc. to the point where it can become exhausting.

People with GAD tend to experience the physical symptoms associated with fear but more often and for more reasons.

Panic disorder

Panic disorder is characterized as fear and worries of the panic attacks experienced recurrently, which are sudden and intense feelings of terror.

These feelings could sometimes occur without warning and are associated with physical symptoms such as chest pain, shortness of breath, fast heart rate, and trembling.

Panic attacks could become very intense that impairs the individual functioning during the episode.

What Causes fear?

Specific phobias usually develop in childhood and, in some cases, can be pinpointed to an exact moment.

In some cases, specific phobias can result from an early traumatic experience with the feared object, event, or situation, such as a phobia of bicycles caused by a traumatic incident of falling off a bike as a child.

Phobias that start in childhood could also be caused by witnessing the phobia of a family member and developing the same phobia. For instance, if a parent has a phobia of spiders, the child may also learn to have a phobia of spiders.

Evolutionary theory of fear

Seligman (1971) applied his preparedness hypothesis theory to explain why humans fear. The preparedness hypothesis is the belief that humans tend to fear things that were a source of danger to our ancestors.

Seligman proposed that the fears of individuals diagnosed with phobias reflect the evolutionary prepared learning to fear events and situations that have provided survival threats.

He argued these threats would be from an evolutionary rather than a contemporary perspective.

This can explain why phobias such as threatening animals, heights, closed spaces, and social evaluations are very common and appear to be innate fears.

Contemporary fears such as bicycles, broken electrical equipment, and guns are less common as these would not have been survival threats to our ancestors.

The preparedness hypothesis suggests that humans can have innate responses to specific stimuli without any previous environment input.

This has been tested by scientists who found it was easier to train humans to fear snakes and spiders than friendly dogs of pillows, for instance.

This was especially true for very young children who appeared to fear snakes and spiders before encountering or hearing about them.

Fear conditioning

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a state of fear or anxiety that has been demonstrated in animals after repeated pairings of a threatening stimulus with a previously neutral stimulus using classical conditioning.

In experiments, the researchers would pair a neutral stimulus with an unpleasant stimulus – such as a loud noise or shock. After repeated pairing of these two stimuli, the neutral stimulus on its own would eventually elicit a state of fear.

This is another way in which intense fear could be caused. The fear expressed by the animals would be seen as essential for their survival in this instance.

This fear conditioning could be learned in humans who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder caused by very distressing, frightening, or traumatic events, causing individuals to relive them through symptoms of intense or prolonged psychological distress when triggered.

This includes marked physiological reactions such as exaggerated and unrelenting unconditioned responses to stimuli (e.g., crowds, flashes of light, or sounds) associated with trauma (e.g., death or injury).

PTSD can bring about feelings of intense fear when something specifically triggers it. Most of the time, the trigger will not be an actual threat to survival but is a conditioned stimulus for the individual.

This means they can experience intense feelings of fear at times when it is not appropriate.

The brain’s fear response

The primary brain region that is responsible for fear is the amygdala. The amygdala is a collection of nuclei in the limbic system.

Some main nuclei in the amygdala are the lateral, basal, central lateral, and central medical nuclei. The lateral nucleus is the primary input that receives input from the thalamus and the brain’s cortex, providing it with information about the sensory stimuli being experienced.

The primary output nucleus of the amygdala is the central medial nucleus which projects to different structures, such as the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, which triggers the release of the stress hormone cortisol.

It also projects to the lateral hypothalamus to stimulate the autonomic nervous system , which results in the physiological symptoms associated with the fight or flight, or fear, response.

The amygdala is also thought to be the brain area responsible for fear conditioning. In rats, it was found that an unconditioned stimulus , such as a shock, is picked up by the spinal cord, which sends this signal to the thalamus and the cortex, which then both project to the lateral nucleus of the amygdala.

The synaptic inputs from the unconditioned stimulus are strong enough to excite the lateral amygdala neurons, activating the neurons in the central medial nucleus and thus produces a fear response.

Sensory information from a neutral stimulus (e.g., music) also reaches the thalamus and cortex.

Still, the inputs from this stimulus are not strong enough on their own to excite the lateral amygdala neurons , so the central amygdala neurons remain unstimulated, and there is no fear response.

However, if the neutral stimulus (music) is paired with the unconditioned stimulus (shock), neurons can encode both simultaneously.

This can strengthen the synapse between incoming neurons carrying information about the neutral stimulus and the lateral amygdala neurons.

Eventually, this synapse is strengthened enough to allow them to stimulate the lateral amygdala neurons on their own without the unconditioned stimulus. The lateral nucleus will then excite the central medial nucleus to produce the fear response.

The hippocampus , which plays a role in storing episodic memories, can also interact with the amygdala and be involved in fear.

The neurons from the hippocampus can project to the basal nucleus of the amygdala, which can then stimulate the central medial nucleus.

Because it can do this, the hippocampus allows contextual-related memories to respond to fear. This could be why we can have fearful memories and why they are so strong.

What does the research say?

There are suggested to be sex differences in amygdala activation.

A study that used the brain imaging technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) found that when presented with happy facial expressions, there was greater activation in the right amygdala for males but not for females.

Both males and females showed greater left amygdala activation for fearful faces, which supports that the left may be more involved in negative affect (Killgore & Yurgelun-Todd, 2001).

Other researchers have found that the volumes of brain regions involved in fear may differ for those who have experienced more trauma.

Using MRI on children who experienced trauma, research found reduced hippocampal and increased amygdala volume with increasing levels of trauma exposure. Higher exposure to violence was also associated with increased amygdala activation.

Finally, increased functional connectivity between the amygdala and the brain stem was associated with higher levels of exposure to violence (Van Rooij, et al., 2020).

How to Overcome and Manage Fear

Treatment for disorders associated with fear varies depending on the type of disorder and the symptoms experienced.

Often, phobias treatments can be used for disorders associated with extreme fear. Some of these treatment options will be explained below:

Graded Exposure Therapy

A common therapy for people with extreme fears is graded exposure therapy . This involves gradually leading the individual through exposure situations commonly used for those with specific phobias.

The aim is to gradually expose the individual to the fear object or situation in small steps until they feel comfortable and can move on to a higher level of exposure until they eventually can face their fear.

For instance, if someone has a phobia of spiders, the steps may go as follows:

Talking to the therapist about spiders

See pictures of spiders – this could start off as drawings and gradually get more realistic until the patient can manage to view a photo of one.

The patient may be encouraged to watch video footage of a spider

The patient could handle a toy spider

Eventually, the patient should get to a stage where they can face a real spider.

The steps taken to complete the therapy may take a long time, depending on how strong the fear is and the individual’s capability to cope.

Once the individual feels like they can manage their fear at each step, they can move on to the next step until they gradually become desensitized to their fear.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)

CBT can help tackle negative and unrealistic thoughts regarding intense fear.

The individual can work with the therapist to work through their fears, form more realistic thoughts, challenge their fearful thoughts, and learn coping strategies.

CBT allows people to learn different ways of understanding and reacting to the source of their fear and can help teach a person to manage their feelings and thoughts.

Some medications can be useful to aid with the symptoms of extreme fear.

Medication should only be used as a short-term treatment for phobias because the medication can become part of safety behaviors for the individual to rely on when facing fearful situations.

This can prevent the individual from fully exposing themselves to the fear and not achieving desensitization eventually.

Below are some medications that can be used for phobias:

Beta-blockers – these work to reduce the physical symptoms of fear by lowering stress on the heart and blood vessels. These block the release of the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine to prevent the fight or flight response from being triggered.

However, these can come with some side effects: insomnia, fatigue, and upset stomach.

Benzodiazepines – tranquilizers are a type of this medication. This helps reduce anxiety symptoms and has a sedative effect on the individual, meaning they slow down the body and brain function.

These medications can be taken when required but have been known to cause a dependency and can have withdrawal effects that could be life-threatening.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) – these medications are a type of antidepressant and are commonly prescribed for phobias.

SSRIs affect serotonin levels in the brain and so can produce better moods in individuals. Side effects of these medications include nausea, sleep problems, and headaches.

Other coping methods

Relaxation techniques can be used to help people calm down. These can include meditation and breath retraining exercises to help treat the symptoms of fear, especially when faced with a fearful situation.

Progressive muscle relaxation is a technique where an individual purposely tenses a muscle group for a few seconds and then releases it. The idea is that the release of the muscles should decrease any build-up tension.

Working through all the muscle groups this way can encourage the whole body to feel relaxed and reduce the fear response. Likewise, yoga can prove a useful method for reducing the fear response.

Combining physical postures, breathing exercises, and meditation in yoga can all help people improve their management of anxiety disorders and fear.

Finally, exercise, specifically aerobic exercise, can positively affect stress and anxiety and may decrease the fear response symptoms.

Killgore, W. D., & Yurgelun-Todd, D. A. (2001). Sex differences in amygdala activation during the perception of facial affect. Neuroreport, 12(11), 2543-2547.

Maren, S., Phan, K. L., & Liberzon, I. (2013). The contextual brain: implications for fear conditioning, extinction and psychopathology.  Nature reviews neuroscience ,  14 (6), 417-428.

Öhman, A. (2009). Of snakes and faces: An evolutionary perspective on the psychology of fear. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 50(6), 543-552.

Rádlová, S., Polák, J., Janovcová, M., Sedláčková, K., Peléšková, Š., Landová, E., & Frynta, D. (2020). Emotional reaction to fear-and disgust-evoking snakes: sensitivity and propensity in snake-fearful respondents. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 31.

Seligman, M. E. (1971). Phobias and preparedness. Behavior therapy, 2(3), 307-320.

Steimer, T. (2002). The biology of fear-and anxiety-related behaviors. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 4(3), 231.

van Rooij, S. J., Smith, R. D., Stenson, A. F., Ely, T. D., Yang, X., Tottenham, N., Stevens, J. S. & Jovanovic, T. (2020). Increased activation of the fear neurocircuitry in children exposed to violence. Depression and anxiety, 37(4), 303-312.

Further Reading

• Kozlowska, K., Walker, P., McLean, L., & Carrive, P. (2015). Fear and the defense cascade: clinical implications and management. Harvard review of psychiatry.
• Adolphs, R. (2013). The biology of fear. Current biology, 23(2), R79-R93.
• LeDoux, J. E. (2014). Coming to terms with fear. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(8), 2871-2878.
• LeDoux, J. E., & Pine, D. S. (2016). Using neuroscience to help understand fear and anxiety: a two-system framework. American journal of psychiatry.

Is fear an emotion?

Yes, fear is a basic emotion that is triggered as a response to perceived threats. It is a survival mechanism that prompts action to protect oneself from danger. Fear can cause physiological changes like increased heart rate, and it can also influence thoughts and behaviors.

How do people perceive fear differently?

People perceive fear differently due to personal experiences, genetic predispositions, cultural norms, and mental health conditions. For some, a situation may trigger intense fear, while others may feel excitement or curiosity in the same situation. People’s coping strategies and resilience significantly influence their responses to fear-inducing situations.

What causes fear?

A perceived threat or danger causes fear. This can be a response to something immediate and obvious, such as coming face-to-face with a dangerous animal, or something more abstract, like a fear of losing one’s job. The brain’s amygdala plays a key role in processing fear by sending signals that trigger the fight-or-flight response. Fear can also be learned through personal experiences or by observing others.

• Essay Editor

Fear: Definition, Effects, and Overcoming Essay

1. introduction.

Fear is one of the most basic human emotions and is the body's reaction to a perceived danger. Fear is a normal emotion that helps protect us from harm: it is programmed into all animals and is an adaptive means of survival. However, for some people, intense, irrational fear can be crippling and may lead to avoidance of certain situations. When an individual's fear affects their everyday life, they may be suffering from a phobia. Phobias are irrational and disabling fears. People with phobias are overly fearful of certain objects or situations. The types of phobias are vast, but can be divided into three categories: specific phobias (fear of particular objects or situations, such as spiders, flying, or elevators), social phobia (fear of being subjected to the judgment of others), and agoraphobia (dread of being in a situation where one feels trapped, or where help would not be available in the event of a panic attack). The results of untreated phobias can be extremely severe. Restricting oneself from certain situations or environments can greatly limit the potential for an individual, and the lack of self-achievement can result in feelings of depression and helplessness. In the worst case scenarios, phobias can lead to fatigue and general tiredness from always being on guard and from the mental anguish of knowing that you are not living life to its fullest potential.

1.1 Definition of Fear

Fear is a feeling induced by perceived danger or threat that occurs in certain types of organisms, which causes a change in metabolic and organ functions and ultimately a change in behavior, such as running away, hiding or freezing from traumatic events. Fear in human beings may occur in response to a specific stimulus occurring in the present, or in anticipation or expectation of a future threat, and may be a subtle avoidance or an escapist response. The fear response arises from the perception of danger leading to confrontation with or escape from the threat (also known as the fight-or-flight response) and in some cases can be a freeze response. In other organisms, fear may be exhibited through escaping, hiding, avoidance of a situation or freezing behavior. When placed in a dangerous or stressful situation, an organism may exhibit these fear responses. A specific fear is an abnormal and persistent fear of a situation or thing. Fears in humans may occur in a specific moment, or may be a long-term fear concerning one's life. A phobia is an irrational fear that produces a conscious avoidance of the feared subject, activity or situation. Fears and phobias can develop from traumatic events, changes in brain chemistry and heredity. Average response time for an acute fear is 8 seconds. This enables an organism to promptly remove itself from the source of danger, and to thus prevent the threat from escalating. Psychologist Susan Mineka has pointed out that it can often be difficult to produce a fear response in laboratory settings as the threat often lacks realism (which is the thought that the source of danger has the actual ability to cause harm or death). This can often be attributed to the ethics of experimenting on human subjects, and the use of animal subjects. These tests involving animals have been criticized for their artificiality.

1.2 Importance of Understanding Fear

Human fear is a universal emotion and it is something that everybody experiences. It is important to understand fear because our lives are influenced by it since the beginning of time. This is evidenced by the pre-programmed physiological responses we are born with, such as the fight or flight response. These are evolutionary built-in mechanisms which are designed to help us survive in threatening conditions. Fear causes the release of adrenaline in the body which in turn triggers the response. Modern day threats to survival do not require such a drastic response as fighting or running away might cause more problems than it would solve. The stress from these changes to our heart rate and increased blood pressure over long periods of time are damaging to our health. Understanding fear's effects on our minds and bodies can help us find ways to avoid the problems caused by fear, and can help us to lead better lives. A great deal of suffering is a result of the fearful thoughts that run rampant in our minds. Most of the time the thoughts are of things that may happen, or even things that are not even close to happening, but we scare ourselves just by thinking of them. These thoughts can spiral out of control, to the point where a person is immobilized by their fear, unable to make a decision of any sort. Understanding the thought patterns involved in fear can be very helpful in reducing their effects. This can be achieved through a logic-based analysis of the thoughts, to determine whether the fear is realistic and whether it is something that could be controlled or overcome. Learning to recognize when someone is scaring themselves, and learning to avoid that thinking are important steps in preventing and overcoming fear.

2. Effects of Fear

The physical effects of fear occur in the straightforward way that adrenaline is released and readies the body to either confront or flee from a situation. When triggered by fear, the body prepares to take action and to also protect itself from possible danger with "fight or flight." This response involves the sudden release of adrenaline from the adrenal glands, which greatly increases the animal's chance of survival. The adrenaline, which courses through the blood, results in an increase in heart rate and blood pressure. The blood flow to the major muscle groups, allowing an increase in physical activity to aid in survival, is also increased. Adrenaline also has the effect of suppressing the immune response, which can be a hazard in the event of an injury during the 'escape' or when a person is exposed to pathogens in a stressful situation. Production of adrenaline is considered to be a short-term reaction to an immediate threat, while cortisol is released for long-term response. This chronic release of cortisol can have effects such as damaged muscles, problems with digestion, and shaking. These effects can become detrimental to the individual's health in the long run, especially if the threat is not resolved. In worst case scenarios, where an individual is constantly exposed to fear, there is the risk of developing chronic diseases. This occurs when the allostatic load (the results of the body's attempts to adapt to adverse psychosocial or physical situations) becomes too high and diseases, which manifest from chronic stress, develop when the body is unable to reverse the effects of allostasis. These diseases include such things as hypertension, atherosclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis to name a few. High doses of cortisol can also lead to impairment of cognitive functions. The psychological effects of fear have a large impact on an individual's quality of life. It can lead to factors such as phobias, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The development of a phobia involves the association of a specific stimulus with a fear response, and occurs when the fear becomes irrational and extreme. Phobias can have a lasting impact on quality of life because it can prevent an individual from taking part in normal day-to-day activities. Anxiety is a persistent feeling of dread, fear, or impending doom which is often accompanied by symptoms such as sweating, rapid heartbeat, stomach pains, and nausea. There are multiple types of anxiety disorders, and fear is a common symptom shared by all of them. Depression involves a despondent mood and decrease in interest or pleasure. Feelings of depression can be triggered by a traumatic event, and prolonged depression can develop into a serious mental illness known as clinical depression. Post-traumatic stress disorder can occur following a traumatic event and can cause problems such as flashbacks, or avoidance of anything that might trigger the memory of the event. These psychological disorders can have detrimental effects on an individual, and if not treated, they can last for a long duration of time.

2.1 Physical Effects of Fear

Section 2.1: Physical Effects of Fear Most of us have experienced being frightened at some point in our lives. We may have felt our hearts pound, our breath come quickly, and our muscles tense. This is because fear triggers a "fight-or-flight" response in the body. The nervous system is activated, causing the release of stress hormones. The adrenal gland releases adrenaline while other parts of the body release corticotrophin releasing factor, which causes the pituitary gland to release corticotrophin. This hormone in turn causes the adrenal gland to release corticosteroids. The release of these hormones has a number of effects on our body; increased heart rate and blood pressure, pale skin, and blood shunted away from our organs and directed into our muscles are just a few examples. All these effects prepare the body for a burst of energy-consuming activity. They are extremely useful in a true fight or flight situation, but if no energy is expended they can be damaging to the body. For example, high blood pressure can lead to hypertension and increased risk of heart attack and the flushing of blood to the muscles can cause weakness and leave the person feeling rubbery-legged. So fear in modern-day life, which rarely requires fight or flight, can lead to damaging physical effects on the body. In order to understand this process, one experiment took two groups of people; one group was about to experience parachute jumps and the other was about to experience public speaking. Both of these situations are scary, but one is as close as we can get to a real-life threatening scenario in a modern-day setting, and the other does not allow the person to expend the burst of energy the bodies had just prepared them for. The experiment showed that the group about to make the parachute jump was less anxious than before the jump compared to the public speaking group. This is due to the fact that the public speaking group did not complete the process, there was fear and preparation, but no fear-reducing activity. This leads to chronically high levels of stress hormones. High levels of stress hormones have been associated with a number of physical and mental health problems, so the fear effects mentioned before could lead to the development of these problems. High blood pressure and weakened muscles were mentioned before, but osteoporosis, diabetes, and memory loss are a few more examples of chronic stress hormone effects. These conditions would not have developed if there was no fear triggering a fight or flight response. This is why it is fair to say that fear, and the physical effects of fear, are more damaging to the body than the thing being feared.

2.2 Psychological Effects of Fear

Usually, the common effect of fear is the feeling of anxiety. This causes fatigue and is usually a way of the body telling the mind that it needs to get away from the cause of fear. However, there are cases where the psychological effects of fear can be a lot more damaging. Phobias are an example of a fear-based psychological condition. Phobias are an irrational or very powerful fear of certain situations, objects, or places. It is a type of anxiety disorder. Fear can lead people to experience strong emotions of anger and disgust. This can prevent logical thinking and produce a force to act immediately that's usually irrational. People who are fearful are so busy trying to protect what they have that they have difficulty enjoying the present, let alone anticipating the future. The broader and more frequent the fear is, the more intense and harsh the person's negative emotions. This creates a cycle that can drive people into depression and other mental problems. Depression is often the result of a person being overwhelmed by a fear or group of fears that seem to have no solution. When a person finally gives up, thinking, "I can't handle this," he or she may experience helplessness and hopelessness. While most people feel depressed at one time or another, the danger in trying to control depression is that many people turn to harmful ways of coping like alcohol or drug abuse, and even suicide.

2.3 Social Effects of Fear

Parsons (1964) lists a number of meanings for the word 'fear'. One is that fear is a state of feelings which consists of psychological and physiological responses to a perceived threat. Another is that it is a specific emotion which is elicited in the presence of particular stimuli. This might occur in a threatening situation when an individual feels a strong desire to escape and the audience to do so is low. And fear is also said to be a trait in which individual differences are based on genetic or inborn dispositions. All of these meanings are important in understanding the effects of fear on human beings in a social setting. Work on fear as a psychological and physiological state has tended to focus on one of two things. The first is measuring fear and its effects. This is often done by creating a threatening situation and measuring the subsequent fear responses or something similar. Wicker and Haridakis, for example, develop a scale to measure fear of victims of crime in the USA. Others often attempt to give evidence which will suggest that different types of fear cause different responses. This is done by manipulating fear in a given situation and showing that different amounts of fear cause different subsequent responses. This type of work occurs mainly in social psychology but is useful to the criminologist looking to understand the effects of fear of crime.

3. Overcoming Fear

Once the sensation of fear is detected and acknowledged, its definition can be discovered, and actions can be taken to master fear. By recognizing the power that fear has over common sense, an individual can diminish its hold on them. This can be accomplished by not giving into the intimidation and continuing to function normally when experiencing the sensation of fear. It is a known fact that it is easier to confront a fear when the situation is not critical, hence this method may be helpful when the level of fear is high. Once the non-threatening situation has been tackled, the individual can then move on to the next level and face the fear in a more threatening circumstance. Another method for conquering the fear sensation is making a strong-minded decision to alter behavior, feeling, and thinking in the situation and in the future. This technique is likened unto taking a personal stand or declaration to change and can be quite empowering for the individual. At the same time, it is beneficial to seek support from someone who is trustworthy, kind, and will not increase the level of fear. This person can encourage and comfort the individual when a fear-provoking situation is being confronted and give insight on the situation from an objective standpoint. He/she can also help analyze the level of fear and the results of the action in order to make future plans for confronting the fear. This method involves taking small steps to make a change and approach the situation differently. Patience and persistence are key factors, and at some point, the fear that was conquered can resurface, so it is important not to become discouraged at relapses. By continuously practicing these methods, it is possible to increase the level of confidence and change the way a fear-provoking situation is approached. This essentially changes the vicious cycle of fear into a virtuous cycle.

3.1 Recognizing and Acknowledging Fear

This first step to overcoming fear is recognizing it. Don't put it out of your mind, and don't try to ignore it. The feeling will just pop up again, often in a different form. The best way to deal with fear is to confront it head on. By its very nature, confronting fear is an anxiety provoking process, so it is best you be well prepared for it. Otherwise, you are likely to become discouraged and give up. Being prepared means understanding in advance what will happen during the confrontation process. A number of specific fears will be addressed in following steps. By far the most effective method for confronting a specific fear is known as graduated exposure. In a safe and controlled way, repeatedly confronting the feared situation is the best way to escape the grip of fear. This should be done frequently, to speed up the process. With repeated exposure, a strong fear inducing situation will become less so as it begins to create new, non-fearful associations. This means the old, fearful associations will weaken. The change in thinking will be noticed when you realize the situation is no longer avoided at all costs. At this stage, a new sense of confidence will be gained and the fear will begin to lose its power.

3.2 Identifying the Root Causes of Fear

Identifying the root causes of your fear is an important step towards overcoming fear. In this phase, you get to know the reason behind the fear. You need to confront your fear and understand why the fear developed in the first place. To help you find out the root causes of your fear, you need to ask yourself some questions: Were you taught to be afraid? Did you have a bad experience and develop a fear based on that? Do you possess a predisposition to be fearful? How do you avoid facing the fear now? Asking such questions will help you collect information that will bring you closer to understanding how the fear developed. Next, you need to determine if the cause of your fear is rational. With your current understanding, is it logical that you are still afraid? To figure out the answer, you need to compare how the fear is now to the initial source of the fear. If there is no logical connection, then the fear is irrational. What characterizes the difference between a rational fear and an irrational fear is whether or not the emotional response and the amount of fear is appropriate given the potential situation or the danger involved. A rational fear has an emotional response that is appropriate given the situation or danger of concern. An irrational fear usually has an emotional response that is inappropriate; too much emotional distress given the actual situation. For example, it is rational to be afraid of hitting a pedestrian if you are driving a car, thus you have a driving phobia; a pedestrian accident is a dangerous situation. An example of an irrational fear would be a driving phobia in a situation when the person is not driving and there is no potential danger involved of driving, but the person is still afraid. This comparison between the fear and potential situations will help you to distinguish whether your fear is rational or irrational.

3.3 Developing Coping Strategies

Cognitive restructuring is the first step in developing coping strategies. This method involves identifying and challenging irrational thoughts. This can be done by recognizing when you are having these thoughts and realizing that they are not based on evidence. You can then begin to debate these thoughts and look for evidence for and against them and come to a more realistic conclusion. An example of cognitive restructuring is a person who is scared of going outside because they are frightened of having an asthma attack and there being nobody around to help them. This person would challenge this thought by looking at evidence of how many times they have had an asthma attack in this situation and how serious it was. It is likely that this person will find the incident is not that frequent or serious and they would also be able to take steps to prevent such an incident.

3.4 Seeking Professional Help

The more severe cases of fear often have serious negative impacts on individual lives, and may even lead to more serious psychological disorders. Getting professional help is thus increasingly significant step to relief from one's fears. Despite that, there is often a certain stigma associated with seeing a mental health professional. People may feel ashamed or embarrassed about seeking help for their fears and anxiety. This is largely unfounded nowadays as psychology is a well respected science, and nearly a quarter of American adults have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, so this is an extremely common issue. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be the most effective form of therapy for anxiety disorders. Many patients who undergo CBT see a significant decrease in their symptoms and a large number go into complete remission. This therapy involves changing thought patterns and facing one's fears in a controlled setting. Medication is also an option for those wanting a more instant relief from their symptoms. Preference of medication or CBT depends on the individual and the severity of their symptoms. Anti-anxiety medications are often fast acting and very effective in the short term. However, it is generally recognized that medications do not provide long term benefits greater than those seen in patients who do not take medications, so it's often seen as a temporary measure. Step one of CBT involves educating the patient and building a therapeutic alliance. This would involve the psychologist educating the patient on the nature of their anxiety and how it can be overcome.

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Essay on Fear

Students are often asked to write an essay on Fear in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Fear

Understanding fear.

Fear is a basic human emotion that alerts us to the presence of danger. It is fundamental to our survival, making us respond quickly when we sense a threat.

Fear’s Role

Fear helps us make decisions that protect us from harm. It triggers our ‘fight or flight’ response, preparing our bodies to either confront or escape danger.

Overcoming Fear

Fear can be overcome by understanding and facing it. When we challenge our fears, we learn to control them, reducing their impact on our lives.

The Positive Side of Fear

Fear can also be positive, motivating us to push beyond our comfort zones, leading to personal growth and achievement.

Also check:

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250 Words Essay on Fear

Fear is an innate emotional response to perceived threats. It is evolutionarily wired into our brains, acting as a survival mechanism that alerts us to danger and prepares our bodies to react. While fear can be a beneficial response, it can also be debilitating when it becomes chronic or irrational.

The Physiology of Fear

Fear triggers a cascade of physiological responses, including the release of adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones prepare the body for the ‘fight or flight’ response by increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and glucose levels. This process, while crucial for survival in threatening situations, can lead to health problems if sustained over a long period.

Fear and the Mind

Psychologically, fear can be both a conscious and subconscious experience. It can be based on real threats or imagined ones, leading to anxiety disorders and phobias. Fear can also influence decision-making, often leading to risk-averse behavior. Understanding the psychological aspects of fear is essential for effective mental health treatment.

Overcoming fear involves recognizing and confronting it. Techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, and mindfulness-based stress reduction can be effective. These strategies aim to change the thought patterns that lead to fear and teach coping mechanisms to manage fear responses.

Fear in Society

Fear also plays a significant role in society, influencing politics, economics, and social interactions. It can be used as a tool of manipulation, or it can drive societal change. Recognizing the societal implications of fear is crucial for fostering a more understanding and empathetic society.

In conclusion, fear is a complex emotion with profound impacts on individuals and society. Understanding its mechanisms and implications can help us navigate our fears and use them as catalysts for growth.

500 Words Essay on Fear

Introduction.

Fear is a universal human experience, an essential part of our biological makeup that has evolved over millions of years. It is a complex emotion that can be both protective and paralyzing, serving as a warning signal for danger while also potentially hindering personal growth and exploration. This essay explores the multifaceted nature of fear, its psychological implications, and its role in shaping human behavior and society.

The Biological Basis of Fear

Fear is fundamentally rooted in our biology. It is a response triggered by the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure in the brain that processes emotional stimuli. When we perceive a threat, the amygdala activates the body’s fight-or-flight response, leading to physiological changes such as increased heart rate, rapid breathing, and heightened alertness. This response is adaptive and has been crucial for human survival, allowing us to react quickly to potential threats.

The Psychological Aspect of Fear

Psychologically, fear is a multifaceted emotion with wide-ranging implications. It can be both acute, as in the immediate response to a threat, and chronic, as in the long-term fear associated with anxiety disorders. Fear can also be learned through conditioning or observation, which explains why different individuals may have different fear responses to the same stimulus.

Fear can lead to avoidance behavior, where individuals steer clear of situations that they perceive as threatening. While this can be protective, it can also be limiting, preventing individuals from pursuing opportunities and experiences that could lead to personal growth.

Fear and Society

On a societal level, fear can be both a unifying and a divisive force. It can bring people together in the face of a common threat, but it can also be exploited to manipulate public opinion and justify oppressive policies. Fear can lead to stereotyping and discrimination, as individuals or groups are scapegoated as threats to societal safety and order.

Overcoming fear involves recognizing and understanding it. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is one effective method, as it helps individuals reframe their fearful thoughts and gradually expose themselves to feared situations. Mindfulness and meditation can also be beneficial, allowing individuals to stay present and focused rather than getting caught up in fearful thoughts.

In conclusion, fear is an integral part of the human experience, with deep biological roots and far-reaching psychological and societal implications. While it can be protective, it can also be limiting and divisive. Understanding and managing fear is therefore crucial, not just for individual well-being, but also for societal harmony and progress. As we navigate through an increasingly complex and uncertain world, the ability to confront and overcome our fears will be more important than ever.

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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!

• “The Big Wave” by Pearl S. Buck: Jiya and Kino’s Rise Above Fear A deeper contemplation of the first few pages of the story reveals that Jiya is always afraid of the ocean since he understands the wrath of the storm and the changes it has brought in […]
• Hitler’s Use of Propaganda and Fear-Mongering The establishment of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party led to the adoption of a properly coordinated propaganda campaign that would prepare the country for war.
• Ghost’s Fear Believe you me that as one listens to all mysterious actions of the ghosts in the stories, he or she is forming the same picture in the mind.
• Xenophobia – The Fear of Foreigners This reaction of the woman is xenophobic because it highlights fear and hatred of people of another race emanating. The second component of xenophobia entails the fear of cultures and the main target of this […]
• Atychiphobia, or the Fear of Failure in Psychology Putting it simply, the fear of failure is the incapability to suppress the anxious and irrational feeling of fear that, as a result, affects one’s life.
• My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone Thus, my monster is the fear of being alone, and it is similar to several literary characters at once: Grendel’s mother, the Demon Lover, and the fear of a couple from Once Upon a Time.
• Why Are We Afraid of Death? However, it can be interesting to understand why the rest of the people are so afraid of death. People are afraid of the unknown.
• The News Media Role in the Culture of Fear The reception of such news has the potential of eliciting fear among the public depending on one’s understanding or relation to the news spread by the media houses.
• 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.
• Substance Abuse in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas The protagonists constantly increase the dose of the hallucinogen, which leads to “a quantitative increase in the effects of the experience”.
• Fear and intolerance of aging – “Love in the time of cholera” by Gabriel Marquez This passage was chosen because it carries with it one of the most dominant themes of the narrative which is the fear and intolerance of aging.
• Robert Frost’s Fear Poetry In Sheehy’s article, Lawrence Thompson notes that the ultimate problem of Frost biographer is to see if the biographer can be enough of a psychologist to get far enough back into the formative years of […]
• “Mediating Effect of the Fear of Missing Out” by Fontes-Perryman and Spina In particular, they were interested in the FOMO and CSMU’s potential mediating effect between OCD and SMF. Overall, the main strength of the argument is that the authors conducted two separate studies involving people from […]
• Fear of Missing Out and Scarcity in Social Media The study’s independent variables were “none”, “some”, and “all”, while the dependent variable was “the number of friends who agreed to attend the event”.
• The Views on the Freedom from Fear in the Historical Perspective In this text, fear is considered in the classical sense, corresponding to the interpretation of psychology, that is, as a manifestation of acute anxiety for the inviolability of one’s life.
• Fear of Immigrants and People of Color in the US The enhancement of strict immigration laws was due to the transfer of immigrants out of Europe to foreigners from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
• Increasing Level of Fear of Crime and Its Cause Curiel and Bishop report that the rate of victimization, meaning the rate of actual crime taking place, is opposite to the rate of fear of crime.
• How to Overcome Fear and Succeed: Informative Speech General purpose: To describe Specific purpose: To teach my listeners the method I use to speak confidently in public and learn new skills.
• The Salem Witch Trials: A Time of Fear The outbreak began with the sudden and rather unusual illness of the daughter and niece of the local Reverend Samuel Parris.
• Gagging Prevalence and Its Association With Dental Fear in 4-12 Year Old Children The Gagging Assessment Scale (GAS) is a questionnaire in which children answered questions about their feelings during a regular dental procedure, for example, tooth brushing.
• Researching of Why Human Beings Fear Death From the religious perspective, some people know about their sins committed on earth in their life and are afraid of the punishment for those sins as opposed to people who believe in God and His […]
• Fighting Fear: The Only Secret Behind Becoming Rich The aim of the proposed research is to determine how fear of risks may affect the decisions taken in accounting and finance and in turn the development of an entrepreneurial culture in people.
• Effects of Community Policing Upon Fear of Crime The purpose of the article aimed at identifying the intervening factors in relation to how people perceive community policing and decrease of criminal threat and anxieties among citizens; therefore, the two researchers aimed to address […]
• The Effects of Campus Shootings on Fear of Crime on Campus This study focuses on investigating the impacts of shootings on fear of crime on campus. First, there is a relationship between campus shootings and fear on crime.
• “Childbirth Fear and Sleep Deprivation in Pregnant Women” by Hall To further show that the information used is current, the authors have used the APA style of referencing which demand the naming of the author as well as the year of publication of the article/book […]
• Culture, Gaze and the Neural Processing of Fear Expressions The paper has a cross-cultural setting and this justifies the appeal to an earlier authoritative study that compared the cultural experience to the expression of basic emotions.
• Theory of Fear as a Part of Public Policy As Machiavelli points out, fear is an integral part of the policy of a prince, in case it bites not his royal majesty, but the people of the state. And since that certainly means a […]
• ”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.
• Fear and Environmental Change in Philadelphia The coincidence of the keywords of both articles is the evident proof of the similarity of the issues analyzed with the only difference concerning the territorial location of the problem.
• Abnormal Psychology: Nature of Fear There is a group of disorders which share obvious symptoms and features of fear and anxiety and these are known as anxiety disorders.
• Fear in News and Violence in Media In the proposed paper I intend to present the prevailing fear in American society and which has been produced by news media and the rise of a “problem frame” which is used to delineate this […]
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Fear of Premature Burial For instance, in The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat the police arrive and stimulate a desire on the part of the narrator to confess his crime and undergo punishment from the state.
• Gender Inequality, Violence Against Women, and Fear in The Sopranos Thus, the major research question will be “Does The Sopranos endorse or criticize VaW through the frequent depiction of the scenes of cruelty?” The hypothesis of the research paper will be “The portrayal of VaW […]
• Technophobes and Their Fear of Technology Technophobes assume that they will whether be laid off by the company or will have to commit to continuous learning, which to many people, is a big challenge on its own.
• Patient’s Dental Fear: Managing Anxiety In order to find out the most effective ways to cope with the patient’s dental fear, one might consider those methods which will be applicable in accordance with the state of a client.
• Educational Administration: Promise and Fear The particular case that Erica has to deal with is the case of Royal Collins, a fourth-grader who has problems in his family and often demonstrates misbehavior at school.
• Fear from Media Reporting of Crimes The biggest question is whether it is the fact that there are criminals all around us, or it is in the head. The role of the media is quite profound in this.
• Ku Klux Klan and Fear-Fueled Hatred The KKK was a violent response to the conflict’s aim of eliminating slavery of black people. The tone of the violent acts that the KKK members performed was vigilant supporters of white supremacy believed that […]
• Psychological Science: Fear of Heights in Infants The article ‘Fear of Heights in Infants?’ by Adolph et al.shows that the conventional belief is a myth and provides an alternative explanation as to why infants avoid falling off the edge.
• Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and Social Media Usage The first hypothesis, for instance, is that the greater the number of social media platforms used regularly, the higher the level of FoMO a person will experience.
• Definition of Dental Anxiety and Fear That way, studying the facts that contribute to the prevalence of anxiety in dental patients, the researchers should study the psychopathological profiles of anxious individuals.
• Overcoming Fear of Failure Consequently, this essay evaluates the roles of research practitioners on how fear of failure generates and the significance of their research in the websites.
• Fear in Behaviorist and Cognitive Perspectives Therefore, my fear is a result of the retrieval of what happened to me on the day I found that snake in my room.
• Psychology of Fear: Amanda Ripley Views Another important element associated with disbelief is lack of information among the victims and those responding to the disaster. The immediate decision to vacate a disaster prone-area is dangerous and lacks in terms of deliberate […]
• Sociological Book “The Culture of Fear” by Barry Glassner The book “The Culture of Fear” presents many examples of the sources of fear in the United States. The peddlers of panic in the country inflate statistics to pursue their causes and goals.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Film Analysis The drugs presented in “Fear and loathing in Las Vegas” are of various types, cigarettes and alcohol are legal, grass is legal only in some countries, and the rest of the drugs are illegal everywhere […]
• Dissecting the American Society: Baltimore, Fear and the Fight for Life Despite the fact that the citizens of Baltimore are also partially responsible for the moral decomposition of the city, the society and the prejudices that it produces also seem to have had a hand in […]
• “Freedom from Fear” by David M. Kennedy Whereas the latter omission may be judged bitterly by critiques of this book, it is interesting to note that the era of the Great Depression has been dramatically discussed by the author to the best […]
• Critical Analyses of the Climate of Fear Report From Southern Poverty Law Center Following the murder of Marcelo Lucero in the Suffolk County, the federal government initiated an investigation to establish the foundations of the practice and pattern of hate crimes against the undocumented immigrants.
• Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard: Passage Analysis To a great extent, this feeling belittles a human being, and in the long term, this emotion can only lead to the bitterness of the individual who is a subject of pity.
• Fear Appeals in Advertising Fear appeals work when advertisers present a moderate amount of fear and a solution to the problem is present in the advertisement. A thorough elaboration of fear may interfere with the communication of the intended […]
• The world after college and fear All the jokes and laughter aside, O’ Brien still manages to remain relevant to the occasion and to his main audience.
• Fear vs. Courage On the other hand, the goodies that ensue from being obedient form the basis of his courage to adhere to set rules and do the will of his authorities.
• Summary of the Article “Should We Fear Derivatives?” It is necessary to become more attentive to the use of derivatives, to follow the development of derivatives, and to study the peculiarities of each derivative’s type in order to use them properly.
• Hopes and Fears in Regard to the “Network Society” On the other hand, the importance of mass media and communication means has led to prevailing role of computers and other instant messaging devices over personal communication, and the resulting depersonalization of human relations.
• The Culture of Fear The culture of fear is not new: it continues to breed with the sustaining efforts of the opportunistic politicians seeking votes from the public by playing on people’s emotions through mass media.
• Embracing the Entire Globe: Globalization Is not to Be Feared! Despite the fact that globalization is designed to reunite people, restoring their economical, political and personal links with one another, there are certain suspicions that the effect of globalization can possibly harm the ethnicity and […]
• The Pianist: When the Mercy Comes Where Angels Fear to Trod Among them, there is the film called The Pianist, a winner of the Palme d’Or on the Cannes Festival and the movie that has raised a great stir among the audience, them regarding the film […]
• Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas In the book “Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas”, the author takes his readers through their experience in the chase of the American Dream.
• Machiavelli’s Claim to Be Either Feared or Loved In describing a leader’s demonstration of his personal skills and knowledge for the attainment of the state’s good, Machiavelli focuses the importance of statesmanship.
• Aerophobia or Fear of Flying The main aim of the careful explanation of the positive reasons of recovering from the condition is to enable the victim to have a feeling of absolute calmness as the session winds up and to […]
• Phil Barker: What Is Fear? According to the author, there is some form of fear that is understandable and advantageous to an individual while there is also some fear that accounts for conflicts that result in war.
• The Movie Tarnished as a Threat: Did They Fear Egoism, Altruism or What Hid in Between? Thus, it is reasonable to suggest that the movie gives a good example of what such people’s traits as egoism and altruism can lead to, once they have been too exaggerated.
• The Fears Within: What Do You See in the Mirror? Without thinking much of what she should take with her, or where the trip would take her, Cassie had bought the tickets and soon was flying away to the islands where the world would be […]
• Fear associated with sexuality issues in society This essay has shown how sexuality particularly in Africa is an issue that has for a long time served to propagate the fear of different people.
• Fear’s Psychological Aspects The controls and the fearful research participants were quicker in finding a target that was fear relevant, which the research group did not fear.
• SARS: It’s as Bad as We Feared but Dared Not Say The cornerstone of the study is the article written by Jennifer Eagleton wherein she described not only the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong in 2003 but also the way the media dealt with the crisis […]
• How Far Did the CCP Control China Through Fear?
• Does Fear Make Our Lives Decisions for Us?
• How Does Iago Inspire Fear and a Looming Sense of Tragedy Through His Soliloquies?
• Can Fear Beat Hope?
• How Does the Reporting of Criminal Offenses Create Fear?
• Does Global Fear Predict Fear in BRICS Stock Markets?
• How Far Was Fear of Communism the Main Reason for the Rise to Power of the Nazi Party?
• Did Hitler Use Fear to Control?
• How Does Spielberg Create Fear and Humour Within Jaws?
• Does Imagination Overcome Fear in the Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe?
• How Does Fear Affect Personal Behavioral Development?
• Can Fear Cause Economic Collapse?
• Does Fear Increase Search Effort in More Numerate People?
• How Does Bram Stoker Use Gothic Conventions to Create an Atmosphere of Suspense and Fear for the Reader?
• Does Monetary Policy Credibility Mitigate the Fear of Floating?
• How Can Fear Arousal Be Used as a Method of Health Promotion?
• Does More Unemployment Cause More Fear of Unemployment?
• How Can One Overcome Fear of Public Speaking?
• Does One Gender Incite Fear Over Another?
• How Are Characters Affected by Fear in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
• Does Religiousness Buffer Against the Fear of Death and Dying in Late Adulthood?
• How Does Culture Mold the Effects of Self-Efficacy and Fear of Failure on Entrepreneurship?
• Does the Fear Gauge Predict Downside Risk More Accurately Than Econometric Models?
• How Does Charles Dickens Build a Sense of Fear Throughout the Signalman?
• Does the Media Affect People’s Fear of Crime?
• How Does Fear Affect Our Society?
• Why Do Males and Females Register Fear Differently?
• How Can Fear Destroy an Individual?
• Was the Cuban Missile Crisis the Result of Castro’s Fear of the U.S. Invasion?
• How Does ‘Moral Panic’ Increase Our Fear of Crime?
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What is fear (a definition), what is fear in psychology (research findings), fear symptoms.

• Rapid heartbeat
• Shortness of breath
• Wobbly legs
• Dizzy or lightheaded
• Feeling of choking
• Indigestion
• Getting chills
• Flushed face

Fear vs Anxiety

Fear examples, fear causes, video: what causes a fear of heights.

Disorders That May Include Fear

Fear Treatments

Coping with fear, tips & techniques for overcoming fear.

Articles Related to Fear

• The Amygdala: Definition, Function, & Location
• Three Ways to Overcome Fear of Failure
• Letting Go: How to Put The Past, Anger, & Fear Behind You
• Negative Emotions: List & 158 Examples (+ PDF)
• Hypervigilance: Definition, Examples, & Symptoms
• ​ ​Eustress: Definition, Causes, & Characteristics ​ ​

Books Related to Fear

• Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
• Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm
• The Gift of Fear
• Feel the Fear . . . and Do It Anyway

Final Thoughts on Fear

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• Adolphs, R. (2013). The biology of fear . Current Biology, 23(2), R79-R93.
• Beck, A. T., & Emery, G. (2005). Anxiety disorders and phobias: a cognitive perspective. New York: Basic Books.
• Beck, A. T., & Steer, R. A. (1993). Beck anxiety inventory manual. San Antonio: Psychological Corporation.
• Birbaumer, N., Veit, R., Lotze, M., Erb, M., Hermann, C., Grodd, W., & Flor, H., (2005). Deficient fear conditioning in psychopathy: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study . Archives of General Psychiatry, 62, 799–805. 
• Bracha, H. S., Ralston, T. C., Matsukawa, J. M., Williams, A. E., & Bracha, A. S. (2004). Does “fight or flight” need updating? Psychosomatics, 45(5), 448-449.
• Buck, R. (1984). The communication of emotion. New York: Guilford Press.
• Ekman, P. (1977). Biological and cultural contributions to body and facial movement. In J. Blacking (Ed.), A.S.A. monograph 15, the anthropology of the body (pp. 39–84). London: Academic Press. 
• Ekman, P. (1992). Are there basic emotions? Psychology Review, 99, 550–553.
• Gray, C. H. (2021). Virus is a language: COVID-19 and the new abnormal . Cultural Politics, 17(1), 92-101.
• Johnson, L. R. (2016). Editorial: how fear and stress shape the mind . Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 10, 00024.
• Konstan, D. (2005). The emotions of the ancient Greeks: a cross-cultural perspective . Psychologia, 48, 225-240.
• LeDoux, J. (2003). The emotional brain, fear, and the amygdala . Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, 23, 727–738. ​
• Maren, S., Luan Phan, K., & Liberzon, I. (2013). The contextual brain: implications for fear conditioning, extinction and psychopathology . Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14, 417-428.
• McLean., C. P., Levy, H. C., Miller, M. L., & Tolin, D. F. (2022). Exposure therapy for PTSD: a meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 91, 102115.
• Öhman, A. (2008). Fear and anxiety: Overlap and dissociation . In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 709–729). New York, NY: Guilford Press. 
• Piscitelli, A., & Perrella, A. M. L. (2017). Fear of crime and participation in associational life . The Social Science Journal, 54(2), 179-190.
• Rachman, S., Levitt, K., & Lopatka, C. (1987). Panic: the links between cognitions and bodily symptoms – I . Behaviour Research and Therapy, 25(5), 411-423.
• Thomson, R. (1979). The concept of fear. In W. Sluckin (Ed.), Fear in animals and man (pp. 1–23). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
• Thorberg, F. A., & Lyvers, M. (2006). Attachment, fear of intimacy and differentiation of self among clients in substance disorder treatment facilities . Addictive Behaviors, 31(4), 732-737.
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7 Things You Need to Know About Fear

5. The more scared you feel, the scarier things will seem.

Posted November 19, 2015 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

• What Is Fear?
• Find a therapist to combat fear and anxiety

Fear can be uncomfortable and crippling. But eliminating it would be the equivalent of taking down your home alarm system because it sometimes makes loud and irritating sounds.

Being fearless doesn’t mean eliminating fear. It means knowing how to leverage fear. And to do that, you need to know a few things about what you are dealing with. (Part 1 of this series was about the fears that keep people up at night.)

1. Fear is healthy.

Fear is hardwired in your brain, and for good reason: Neuroscientists have identified distinct networks that run from the depths of the limbic system all the way to the prefrontal cortex and back. When these networks are electrically or chemically stimulated, they produce fear, even in the absence of a fearful stimulus. Feeling fear is neither abnormal nor a sign of weakness: The capacity to be afraid is part of normal brain function. In fact, a lack of fear may be a sign of serious brain damage.

2. Fear comes in many shades.

Fear is an inherently unpleasant experience that can range from mild to paralyzing—from anticipating the results of a medical checkup to hearing news of a deadly terrorist attack. Horrifying events can leave a permanent mark on your brain circuitry, which may require professional help. However, chronic stress , the low-intensity variety of fear expressed as free-floating anxiety , constant worry, and daily insecurity, can quietly but seriously harm your physical and mental health over time.

3. Fear is not as automatic as you think.

Fear is part instinct, part learned, part taught. Some fears are instinctive: Pain, for example, causes fear because of its implications for survival. Other fears are learned: We learn to be afraid of certain people, places, or situations because of negative associations and past experiences. A near-drowning incident, for example, may cause fear each time you get close to a body of water. Other fears are taught: Cultural norms often dictate whether something should be feared or not. Think, for example, about how certain social groups are feared and persecuted because of a societally-created impression that they are dangerous.

4. You don’t need to be in danger to be scared.

Fear is also partly imagined, and so it can arise in the absence of something scary. In fact, because our brains are so efficient, we begin to fear a range of stimuli that are not scary ( conditioned fear ) or not even present ( anticipatory anxiety ). We get scared because of what we imagine could happen. Some neuroscientists claim that humans are the most fearful creatures on the planet because of our ability to learn, think, and create fear in our minds. But this low-grade, objectless fear can turn into chronic anxiety about nothing specific, and become debilitating.

Through a process called potentiation , your fear response is amplified if you are already in a state of fear. When you are primed for fear, even harmless events seem scary. If you are watching a documentary about venomous spiders, a tickle on your neck caused by, say, a loose thread in your sweater will startle you and make you jump out of your seat in terror. If you are afraid of flying, even the slightest turbulence will push your blood pressure through the roof of the plane. And the more worried you are about your job security, the more you will sweat it when your boss calls you in for even an uneventful meeting.

6. Fear dictates the actions you take.

Actions motivated by fear fall into four types—freeze, fight, flight, or fright. Freeze means you stop what you are doing and focus on the fearful stimulus to decide what to do next (e.g., you read a memo that your company will be laying off people). Next, you choose either fight or flight . You decide whether to deal with the threat directly (tell your boss why you shouldn’t be laid off) or work around it (start looking for another job). When the fear is overwhelming, you experience fright : You neither fight nor flee; in fact, you do nothing—well, you obsess about the layoffs, ruminate, and complain, but you take no action. Being continuously in fright mode can lead to hopelessness and depression .

7. The more real the threat, the more heroic your actions.

We react differently to real and imagined threats. Imagined threats cause paralysis. Being scared about all the bad things that may or may not happen in the future makes you worry a lot but take little action. You are stuck in a state of fear, overwhelmed but not knowing what to do. Real threats, on the other hand, cause frenzy. When the threat is imminent and identifiable, you jump to action immediately and without flinching. This is why people are much more likely to change their eating habits after a serious health scare (e.g., a heart attack) than after just reading statistics about the deleterious effect of a diet based on fried foods. If you want to mobilize your troops, you have to put yourself in danger.

Fear can be as much an ally, as it can be an enemy. And fear of fear can keep you locked in a cage of insecurity. How do you overcome it? You learn to leverage it. More about that in Part 3.

Theo Tsaousides, Ph.D. is a neuropsychologist, assistant professor, and author of the book Brainblocks: Overcoming the Seven Hidden Barriers to Success .

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Fear-Definition Paper

Fear Heart pounding, heavy breathing, and pale skin are all triggered by what is known as fear. But what is fear, really? Is it simply just being afraid? Are there things that should be feared? Can a person control fear? These questions can be thought-provoking at best but they all lead to the same answer. Fear is what overcomes the mind when a person is put into a situation they don't know how to handle. Fear can be expressed in many ways, such as crying, screaming, sweating, silence, running, hiding, and much more. Fear is like that moment of not knowing what is going to happen. Certain situations call for different actions. For example, a young woman is sitting at home watching tv when all of a sudden the back door crashes …show more content…

As she is checking out, she notices that one man in line has something sticking out of his coat pocket. As she looks closer, she realizes it's a gun and immediately begins to breath heavy. The man with the gun is just an undercover cop picking some things up. When the woman realizes this, she begins to calm down. Her expression of fear was breathing heavy. Just the sight of a gun, lets the fear set in and take over. For her it brings up bad memories of the past. Coping with fear is a hard thing to do, but it is the only thing some people can do. While coping is an option, some people try to face their fears. Can someone overcome a fear, if said fear has not been experienced? If a man has a fear of skydiving, but has never actually done it, can he truly fear it? Other factors can play a role, such as if the man is afraid of heights due to a bad experience or if the man has asthma. If the man has a fear of heights, then it would be assumed that he would have a fear of skydiving. But if the man just feared skydiving by itself, would he face his fear by skydiving? Yes, he would. To overcome a fear doesn't always mean it has to be experienced. The man could of witnessed another guy fall to his death from skydiving and now fear death. Everyone experiences fear at one point in their life. The experiences may vary greatly, but fear is still outcome. Without fear boundaries would not matter. What is stopping a person from robbing a bank? Fear.

Examples Of Fear In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Fear is one of the oldest,strongest, most uncontrollable and an unavoidable feelings. It can: make you sweat, make you cry, shake or even lose your appetite for food. It can also cause people to do stupid things that they never would do in ordinary circumstances. This can be seen in many different aspects of life. One place it can be seen is literature. It can also be seen in movies and t.v. The last place fear is shown is real life.

Lord Of The Flies Fear Quotes

What is fear? Fear is a particular state of mind than can be originated from a realistic circumstance or a sense

Fear In The Crucible

Fear is a powerful human emotion. It can make you do things you wouldn’t normally do, like risk taking and bad choices. Fear can spike your adrenaline. For example if someone was to lift a car off a run over child, that would be caused by adrenaline, which is caused by fear. According to several studies done by physicians

Essay On John Deere's Steel Plow

Fear is a chemical chain reaction in the brain. It is in the part of the brain that allows us to communicate and to speak with other people ("Layton, Julia"). The idea is an autonomic response in the brain with many parts of the brain involved. Fear starts with a scary stimulus and ends with a fight or flight response telling the human to fight back or run away. It starts with two processes the quick and messy way, and the clear and slow way ("Layton, Julia"). The quick way is when you are panicking and out of breath and the clear way takes a while and is when you calm down and realize it was nothing. Both of the processes happen simultaneously ("Layton, Julia"). The brain uses your blood stream and nervous system to create fear. When your muscles tighten and your heart races, you are probably in a state of fear. Without fear you would walk into traffic or pick up poisonous snakes. Fear saves our lives ("Layton,

Amygdala Dbq Analysis

Fear is just an Illusion; One that most innocent people can not control. Fear comes to a person when the person does not know what to do and is in an helpless position or in other words insecure. Unfortunately according to many sources a lot of human fear is based on social anxieties and threats. When someone puts one in a situation the person receiving the situation can not control it triggers hyperactivity in the amygdala which causes them to think irrationally. Without knowing what to do these innocent souls end up making the wrong decision and possibly ruin their lives.

The Crucible Fear Analysis

The definition of fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. Fear is easy to overcome. You just have to push the fear out of your mind and block it out. When I was nine years old I use to be extremely scared of roller coasters. Then one day i was at WonderWorks in Destin, Florida and there was this ride in there where you had to pedal it to go upside down.

Theme Of Fear In The Crucible

Fear is an emotional response made by a threat, which causes a change in brain and organ function, as well as behavior. It is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that something or someone is dangerous and likely to cause paint or threat. Usually fear is caused by something traumatizing that has happened in one’s life. In order to overcome fear, you have to face it. Avoiding fear prevents people from moving forward and standing up to fearful things help move past that fear. (Towey)

Pathological Fear Of African Americans

According to PhycologyToday.com fear is an emotional response induced by a perceived threat, which causes a change in brain and organ function, as well as in behavior. Fear can lead us to become narcissistic, to run away from various issues, or to freeze up and become victim under circumstance, or it may come in the form of a discovery.

Examples Of Fear In Macbeth

Fear is an emotion that makes people do things that they would not normally do, for better or for worse. People tend to let their emotions guide their actions as-well-as control their lives. Fear does two things, it can negatively impact people or it can positively

Fear In Macbeth And Warren Pryor

Fear is a crazed emotion that controls the life of anyone it touches. The rollercoaster of fear that many ride, can be the breaking point, or the bounce back part in life. Fear is represented in all stories like in Macbeth, The Leaving, and Warren Pryor. All of these stories have a major impact in the plot all due to fear within the characters. With fear present in the character, it drives them to act ways they would not have.

What is Fear and What Causes It? Essay

• 9 Works Cited

Fear is something that large amounts of people have encountered at least once at some point in their lives. It has been said to have caused a variety of outcomes, many of them being largely negative. Therefore, it is a common human response to react to fear by counteracting it with positivity and/or success. The idea people have of what fear is depends on the person. In the article “How Fear Works”, for example, fear is defined as a “chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals” (Layton 1). The website “Psychology Today” defines fear another way, calling it “a vital response to physical and emotional danger” ("Fear Paranoia”). There are several other definitions people have on the

Right To The Streets Of Memphis By Richard Wright: Chapter Analysis

Fear is what we feel when we are scared or afraid of something or someone. In this story “Right to the streets of Memphis” by Richard Wright. Richard was scared “Sent me home in panic” (115). This shows how he was afraid of the gang. So after he had gotten beaten up by them he did not understand what was happening. Thus, fear is a difficult route to go do but what really matters

Definition Essay: A Fear Of Three Fears

Have you ever cringe, scream, jump back panic or even ran away form something? If you have then you have experienced fear. Fear is simply things you are scared of . at one point in time everyone has experienced being scared of something weather it was a big or small a small fear, some people fear sharks ,wet grass, mushroom, and even germs like others I have three fears that make me shake with anxiety, panic with fear and scream with terror ,they are carnival rides, horror movies ,and house basements although these fears are small, fears are common and normal to have .

Extended Definition of Fear Through Examples Essays

Fear is a feeling created in a response to a perceived danger. Fear can produce pleasure, heighten awareness, be in the form of phobia, a fear of the unknown and an instinctual response to danger.

My Fears Essay

According to my dictionary, Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. When the word "fear" comes to my mind, I think of an emotion that's caused by a bad situation. There are many things in this world that put fear in me. My greatest fears are computer viruses, thugs, sick people, and clowns. Each of these fears make me very scared and give me goosebumps.

Related Topics

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Essay on Fear

Fear, a fundamental human emotion, plays a pivotal role in our survival and decision-making processes. It is both a protector and a barrier, influencing actions, choices, and even the course of societies. This essay delves into the nature, causes, effects, and overcoming of fear, offering insights for students participating in essay writing competitions.

At its core, fear is an emotional response to perceived threats, evolving as a survival mechanism to protect organisms from danger. It activates the “fight or flight” response, preparing the body to react to potential harm. However, fear’s influence extends beyond immediate physical threats, affecting psychological and social dimensions of human life.

The Causes of Fear

Fear arises from various sources, both tangible and abstract. Physical threats, such as predators or natural disasters, elicit instinctive fears for personal safety. Psychological fears stem from internal sources, such as fear of failure, rejection, or the unknown. Social fears, like public speaking or social exclusion, reflect the importance of belonging and approval in human society.

The Effects of Fear

Fear’s effects can be both beneficial and detrimental. On the positive side, fear can heighten awareness, motivate precautionary measures, and inspire acts of courage and resilience. Conversely, excessive or irrational fear can lead to anxiety, stress, and a range of phobias, impacting mental health and quality of life. Fear can also inhibit personal growth and social progress by discouraging risk-taking and innovation.

The Physiology of Fear

The physiology of fear is a complex biological response that occurs when the brain perceives a threat or danger. This innate reaction is vital for human survival and has evolved over thousands of years to prepare the body to respond to potential harm. Understanding the physiology of fear can provide insights into how the body reacts in stressful situations. Here is an overview of the key physiological processes involved:

• Perception of Threat: The process begins when the brain’s sensory systems detect a potential threat. This threat could be physical, such as encountering a predator, or psychological, like a stressful social situation.
• Activation of the Amygdala: The amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure in the brain, plays a central role in processing emotional responses, including fear. When a potential threat is detected, the amygdala becomes activated.
• Increased Heart Rate: The heart rate increases to pump more blood to muscles and vital organs, ensuring they receive sufficient oxygen and nutrients for action.
• Dilation of Airways: The airways in the lungs dilate, allowing for increased oxygen intake to support physical exertion.
• Enhanced Blood Flow: Blood is redirected from less vital functions, such as digestion, to the muscles and brain.
• Pupil Dilation: The pupils of the eyes dilate to improve peripheral vision and increase the amount of light entering the eyes, enhancing visual awareness.
• Increased Sweating: Sweating increases to regulate body temperature during physical exertion.
• Muscle Tension: Muscles tense up in preparation for rapid movement.
• Heightened Sensory Perception: Fear also heightens sensory perception, making individuals more alert and sensitive to their surroundings. This heightened awareness can help detect potential threats more effectively.
• Cognitive Changes: Fear can affect cognitive functions, such as decision-making and memory. The brain may prioritize immediate survival over long-term planning and rational thinking.

Fear in Society and Culture

Societal and cultural factors significantly shape perceptions of fear. Media, folklore, and social norms can amplify fears, sometimes creating disproportionate responses to threats. Cultural differences also influence what is feared and how fear is expressed, reflecting the diverse ways humans have adapted to their environments and histories.

Overcoming Fear

Overcoming fear involves both understanding its origins and actively confronting it. Techniques such as exposure therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and mindfulness practices can help individuals manage and reduce fear. Education and awareness play crucial roles in demystifying fears, particularly those rooted in misinformation or lack of understanding.

Fear and Decision Making

Fear can be a double-edged sword in decision making. While it can caution against genuine dangers, it can also lead to overly conservative choices or paralysis by analysis. Recognizing when fear is a helpful advisor versus when it is an irrational obstacle is key to making balanced, informed decisions.

The Role of Fear in Learning and Growth

Facing and overcoming fears is essential for personal development and learning. Each conquered fear builds resilience, confidence, and a sense of achievement. Moreover, the process of facing fears encourages empathy and understanding towards others who are confronting their own fears.

The Social Implications of Fear

At a societal level, fear can both unite and divide. It can mobilize communities against common threats but can also be manipulated to foster division, prejudice, and conflict. Understanding the social dynamics of fear is vital for building cohesive, resilient communities.

Fear and the Future

In an ever-changing world, fear of the future is a significant concern for many. Technological advancements, environmental changes, and global uncertainties contribute to this fear. However, history shows that humanity has the capacity to adapt and overcome challenges, suggesting that facing the future with hope and preparedness is more productive than succumbing to fear.

In conclusion, Fear is an intrinsic part of the human experience, influencing individuals and societies in profound ways. While it can protect and motivate, it can also hinder and harm. Understanding fear—from its physiological basis to its psychological and social dimensions—is crucial for managing it effectively. By confronting and overcoming our fears, we unlock our potential for growth, resilience, and progress. This exploration of fear not only provides a comprehensive understanding of its nature and effects but also empowers students to approach their own fears with insight and courage, making it an invaluable contribution to any essay writing competition.

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The Biology of Fear

Ralph adolphs.

Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, ude.hcetlac.ssh@shplodar

Each of us has felt afraid, and we can all recognize fear in many animal species. Yet there is no consensus in the scientific study of fear. Some argue that “fear” is a psychological construct rather than discoverable through scientific investigation. Others argue that the term “fear” cannot properly be applied to animals because we cannot know whether they feel afraid. Studies in rodents show that there are highly specific brain circuits for fear, whereas findings from human neuroimaging seem to make the opposite claim. Here I review the field and urge three approaches that could reconcile the debates. For one, we need a broadly comparative approach that would identify core components of fear conserved across phylogeny. This also pushes us towards the second point of emphasis: an ecological theory of fear that is essentially functional. Finally, we should aim even to incorporate the conscious experience of being afraid, reinvigorating the study of feelings across species.

Introduction

Could you be in a state of fear without feeling afraid? Is fear applicable to species like rats? What about flies? And how would you know?

Laypeople have no difficulty using the word “fear” in everyday conversation, yet are quickly stumped by questions such as these. So are psychologists and biologists. Despite an explosion of recent findings, spurred in large part by funding to help understand mood and anxiety disorders, the field of emotion research is more fragmented than ever. Much of this fragmentation, and much of the excitement, comes from the highly interdisciplinary nature of how fear is being investigated. A flurry of neurobiological data has come from two technical developments: fMRI (applied to humans) and optogenetics (applied to mice). Yet findings from these two approaches, together with ecological and psychological work, have not resulted in the emergence of any consensus on how to operationalize or investigate the emotion fear. Here I review this field from a broad perspective and suggest an approach to investigating fear that aims to move beyond the debates, and to reinvigorate studies by returning to some of the historical roots.

At the outset, we need an operational definition of “fear”. The approach I advocate is pragmatic: fear is an intervening variable between sets of context-dependent stimuli and suites of behavioral response. Its usefulness is explanatory, and one can be agnostic about any correspondence with other psychological, let alone neurobiological, states. Such a variable could take on a consistent set of values within an individual, and differ systematically between individuals, making it a candidate for a personality trait. It could be linked to variation in genotype, at least in part, making it a candidate for an endophenotype.

Several features of such a concept of “fear” are important to stress. First and foremost, it is a functional definition: fear is a central state of an organism ( Box 1 ). It is not identified with the conscious feeling of being afraid, nor with fear behaviors such as screaming and running away. Both feelings and behavior can of course be used as evidence for a central state of fear, but the evidence for the state is not the state itself. Instead, fear as a central state is what causes the conscious experience (in some species and under some conditions) and what causes the fear behaviors (again, the details depending to some extent on species and circumstances). Fear in turn is caused by particular sets of stimuli (in a context-dependent way). Fear is what links sets of stimuli to patterns of behaviors. Unlike with reflexes, this link in the case of an emotion like fear is much more flexible (hence all the parenthetical qualifiers in this paragraph) and the state can exist prior to and after the eliciting stimuli (decoupling the state of fear from the eliciting stimuli, unlike with reflexes).

Box 1. The functional state of fear

This review urges a functional concept of fear, defining this emotion in terms of being caused by particular patterns of threat-related stimuli, and in turn causing particular patterns of adaptive behaviors to avoid or cope with that threat. This immediately raises an important question: are we discovering “fear” through objective scientific investigation, or are we imputing it through our concept of “fear”? In the same way that studies in physics would not reveal to us a material object category such as “chairs”, neurobiological studies of fear might not carve out a state of “fear”. Instead, fear, like chairs, might be a psychologically constructed category (this of course ultimately makes it no less biological) [ 6 ]. The answer to this worry depends on assuming that patterns seen by scientists, in particular ethologists, are also patterns seen by evolution. Unlike distinguishing categories such as “table” and “chair”, which are also functional, but entirely socially constructed, categories such as “fear” and “disgust” correspond to functional categories that evolution has sculpted. Without this assumption of functional homology, it becomes impossible to study fear across species. This is also the reason why it would be nonsensical to assign “fear” (or any other emotion) to an alien species from another planet (unless we knew a lot about its environment and the mechanisms for evolution on that planet, and these were sufficiently similar to the case on earth).

Another question concerns how fear would relate to other central states, such as learning or attention. Just like a state of fear interfaces causally with stimuli and behavior, it is embedded in a network of causal relationships with other cognitive processes. Are these other processes partly constitutive of fear? A state of fear is typically constituted (in part) by motivating the organism to behave in a certain way, modulating memory, and directing our attention. So, those aspects of motivation, attention and memory, just like certain aspects of behavior, are part of an adaptive response to a threatening stimulus. As such, they are constitutive. However, whereas the causal links to stimuli and behavior are functionally definitional of fear, the links to other central states have a more empirical flavor to them: we need to do psychology and/or neuroscience to discover them, and we may not want to tie the state of fear too closely to their necessary causal interaction because not all animals may have the same psychological or neurobiological architecture.

The functional approach to defining fear as a central state evoked by threatening stimuli can be criticized as seemingly circular. What is fear? The state evoked by threat. What is threat? That which causes fear. The reason that our definition of fear is not circular is that it is anchored not only in stimuli, but in behaviors. Certain sets of stimuli and behaviors covary; if they did not, we would never be able to attribute fear to other people or animals, but we can.

Specifying the sets of stimuli that normally elicit fear, and the sets of behavioral, autonomic, endocrine, and cognitive responses caused by fear, is of course a large and complex task. It is made easier by statistical regularities in the environment, and by phylogenetic continuity. There are evolved sets of behavioral packages to particular classes of stimuli encountered in a particular context in the case of rats [ 1 ], as in humans [ 2 ] (see also Table 3 ). Ecologists uncover the packages of behaviors and classes of stimuli as they occur in their natural environment, psychologists attempt to link their processing to the rest of cognition, and neuroscientists work on figuring out how the stimuli can be linked to the behaviors by the brain.

Correlations between prototypical fear scenarios (left column) and ratings of behavioral response in humans.

The left column lists attributes on which verbal scenarios were rated; these were derived from ecological studies of rodents. The columns to the right list correlations with the types of responses given by 79 women in the study [ 2 ].

Historical and Current Debates

Theories of emotion have a long and checkered history, and perennial questions remain. How many emotions are there? What defines an emotion? Are emotions discrete or dimensional? What is their function? Which are unique to humans? Historically, much of the work has been done in philosophy and psychology with an almost exclusive focus on humans. There is debate concerning whether there is a small set of “basic” emotions that might be universal [ 3 ], and alternative accounts have proposed underlying dimensional frameworks and theories based on the psychological construction of emotions [ 4 – 6 ] ( Table 1 ).

Emotion theories of fear.

A sampling of some of the commonly encountered frameworks for thinking about fear. For a more general introduction to psychological theories of emotion, see [ 127 , 128 ].

More recently, these debates have been informed by functional neuroimaging, and in particular by several meta-analyses that have tried to glean patterns of regional brain activation seen across larger numbers of studies. More than a century ago, the psychologist William James already envisioned emotions as corresponding to specific psychophysiological patterns in the body [ 7 ], although he recognized that each instance of an emotion might have a different pattern. Indeed, finding reliable psychophysiological patterns that would classify emotion categories (e.g., happiness vs. sadness) is an idea for which there has been little empirical support. Nowadays this picture has been transposed into the brain, and the debate remains alive: are there specific brain systems for happiness, for fear, for anger, for sadness? These emotions and others like them all seem distinct in terms of how we experience them, so one naturally wonders whether there are correspondingly distinct neural systems that generate them. Yet whereas some meta-analyses have found distinct patterns of brain activation corresponding to different basic emotions [ 8 , 9 ], others have claimed that simpler or more abstract dimensional frameworks provide a better description of the data, or that the emotions we normally categorize simply do not have corresponding distinct patterns of activation in the brain at all [ 10 , 11 ] ( Figure 1 ). These neurobiological results, together with psychological studies, have kept alive arguments about whether there are basic emotions like fear, whether there are basic emotions but they are more general or abstract than “fear” [ 12 , 13 ], or whether emotions such as fear instead correspond to regions in a broad dimensional space of valence and arousal, or of reward and punishment [ 4 , 14 – 16 ], and might be to a large degree social constructs in humans [ 6 ].

(A,B) Examples suggesting that there is no focused neural network for fear, but that emotions are instead processed in a very distributed fashion. (A) Meta-analysis of activation in the amygdala. The y-axis plots the proportion of studies surveyed that showed significant activation within 10mm of the amygdala (inset), broken down in terms of studies looking at the perception (per) or experience (exp) of particular emotions. (B) Significant activations in specific brain regions (structures in boxes around the outside of the circle) as a function of specific processes (blue lines: left hemisphere, green lines: right hemisphere). The percentage plots from the origin denote the change in odds that an activation would be seen, from logistic regression of the meta-analysis. Modified from a meta-analysis of 91 neuroimaging studies [ 126 ]; see also [ 11 ]. Abbreviations: DLPFC=dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; ATL=anterior temporal lobe; VLPFC=ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; DMPFC=dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; aMCC=anterior middle cingulate cortex; sACC=subgenual anterior cingulate cortex; OFC=orbitofrontal cortex. (C) Example to the contrary, suggesting that there is a focused neural network for fear, prominently including the amygdala. Activation likelihood maps of fear are shown from another meta-analysis of 30 recent neuroimaging studies [ 8 ]; here hotter colors represent greater spatial overlap (consistency) among significant activations across multiple studies in the meta-analysis. The amygdala is prominently activated across studies of fear.

All of this would have seemed rather bizarre to Charles Darwin [ 17 ], were he alive to witness these debates. Aside from utilizing mostly data from fMRI, the debate has also mostly used data from humans. Yet one of the key points Darwin made regarding emotions was their phylogenetic continuity: nonhuman primates, rodents, and even invertebrates, show strong homologues or analogues of several human emotions, both functionally and behaviorally (perhaps most clearly for aggression, fear, and disgust). Of course, there are aspects of all emotions that are likely unique to humans (e.g., those aspects dependent on language); and there well may be varieties of emotions unique to humans (e.g., emotions such as guilt or awe, although precursors to such emotions can likely be found in other animals as well). But it would seem that a logical starting point would be to pick an emotion for which there is good reason to believe in a strong phylogenetic continuity, understand its neurobiological basis in animal models, and then build on that core emotion scaffold the elaborations that the human brain provides [ 18 ]. There would be no better place to start such an endeavor than the emotion of fear.

Types of Fear

Some psychological theories propose that fear is a biologically basic emotion of all humans and many other animals [ 3 ], a view in line with most lay opinions as well. But several proposals beg to differ, arguing that emotions like fear should be replaced by a distinction between a fear and a panic system [ 12 ], or “survival circuits” related more broadly to adaptive behavior [ 13 ], or dimensional accounts such as reward and punishment [ 15 ]. A variety of evidence supports a view also in line with common usage: there are types fear.

The most common distinction is between fear and anxiety. Whereas fear is usually conceptualized as an adaptive but phasic (transient) state elicited through confrontation with a threatening stimulus, anxiety is a more tonic state related to prediction and preparedness-- the distinction is similar to the one between emotions versus moods. Some schemes have related fear and anxiety to dissociable neural structures for mediating their behavioral effects, for instance the central nucleus of the amygdala (for fear), and the nearby bed nucleus of the striaterminalis (for anxiety) [ 19 ]. However, the dense interconnectivity of these two structures makes it difficult to uniquely assign either of them to participation in only one of these processes. A yet finer-grained classification makes distinctions between anxiety, fear, and panic, three varieties of fear that each are associated with particular packages of adaptive responses yet can all be mapped also onto a continuum of threat imminence (respectively, from more distal to more proximal [ 20 ]).

There is also evidence for multiple fear circuits in relation to the content of the threat. For instance, it has been argued that there are separate neural systems for fear of pain, predators, and aggressive conspecifics [ 21 ]. Each of these can be processed through a distinct sensory channel (e.g., somatosensory, olfactory, visual), engage distinct subnuclei in the amygdala and hypothalamus, and result in distinct responses mediated by particular parts of the periaqueductal gray (PAG) (respectively, ventrolateral, dorsolateral, and dorsomedial). Some of these distinctions among putative fear-subsystems are also supported by distinct molecular markers. For example, the predator-related subsystem is marked by the expression of steroidogenic factor 1 across several species, and corticotropin releasing factor is expressed across a wide range of species and serves as a marker of the central amygdala in rodents (see Box 1 in [ 21 ]). A recent comparison between humans and mice revealed that copy number variations at specific genetic loci can influence remarkably specific types of fear: duplications of the GTF2I gene are associated with increased separation anxiety in both species [ 22 ].

Are these findings of multiple fear systems a problem for a concept of “fear” as a central state? Of course, partly different sets of individual neurons will no doubt be involved in processing different fear stimuli, or for that matter even the identical fear stimulus but on different occasions. This no more shows that there are distinct fear systems than does the fact that different visual images evoke somewhat different patterns of neural response in visual parts of the brain: nobody would conclude from this that there are many different visual systems. To demonstrate distinct fear systems, we would need to be able reliably to trace processing streams, and we would need to decide on the level of grain at which such processing streams are implemented in the brain. If we do find more than one such parallel processing stream for fear, then this could show that there are neurobiologically distinct types of fear that all share a common ecological theme (they are about threat, but different types of threat). But unless the number of such parallel systems gets very large, this would seem like progress in understanding the microstructure of fear, rather than an obstacle to using the term. In this respect, the data so far would seem to indicate that “fear” is quite a cohesive concept with likely fewer subtypes than, say, “memory”.

Three Recommendations for the Study of Fear

A functional definition of fear motivates three recommendations that form recurring themes throughout this review. One is that an investigation, and ultimate functional and neurobiological understanding, of fear requires a comparative approach: it cannot be investigated in humans alone. A second, complementary, idea is that understanding fear requires careful ecological work by biologists observing particular species in their natural environment in order to describe its functional role. This in turn suggests a need for close collaboration between psychologists and neuroscientists working in the lab, on the one hand, and biologists in the field, on the other. A third, more speculative, idea is that a fruitful purchase on understanding fear may be to investigate how it is experienced (felt) across species.

The first two recommendations capitalize on Darwin’s original insight about the phylogenetic continuity of emotional expressions [ 17 ] and assume that it will be easier in many respects to understand fear in rodents, zebrafish, or even invertebrates, than in humans. A benefit of including animals with simpler brains in this range is that it forces us towards a concept of a fear state that is more abstract and functional, rather than one tied to any particular neurobiological implementation or type of conscious experience. Another reason it is advantageous to investigate fear in nonhuman animals is of course that many experiments are simply much easier, or only feasible, carried out this way-- ranging from optogenetic manipulation of precisely defined cell populations, to mapping of gene loci that contribute to fearfulness. Inducing fear in the laboratory in ecologically valid ways also is much simpler in animals other than humans (who typically know they are part of an experiment).

The third recommendation opens the door for a particularly exciting set of future studies. It not only investigates what the layperson might consider the most important and salient aspect of fear (how it feels), but also may provide a clever experimental approach for how to classify the multi-dimensional behavioral and cognitive accompaniments of fear. The basic idea is that the brains of higher mammals (and perhaps other animals) already do a lot of the work for us: they already represent emotional states so as to provide the animal with a more compact description of its current functional state. Rather than attempting to record and extract patterns for “fear” from all the varied somatic, visceral, endocrine and cognitive changes that can accompany an emotion, we might simply look to the interoceptive self-representations in the brain that map these variables [ 23 , 24 ]. In humans, their joint representation provides an important part of the information on the basis of which people can verbally report that they feel afraid. Of course, there are well-known difficulties with using verbal report as the sole source of data; the recommendation here is not to rely on verbal report per se, but to push it back one level to measurement of the neural representation on which verbal reports are in part based (a measurement that is of course also available in nonverbal animals, once we know where to look). This third theme goes hand in hand with current developments in the neurobiology of consciousness, and it may bring back to the scientific study of emotions a topic that, ever since Behaviorism, has been excluded (despite the fact that many modern neurobiological views on emotion now mention it [ 12 , 13 , 15 , 24 , 25 ]).

Neural Circuits for Fear

Many cortical regions together with midbrain and brainstem nuclei participate in fear responses, but how they all interact still remains relatively unclear (see [ 12 , 26 , 27 ] and Figure 5 for some partial schemes). I do not attempt any kind of comprehensive review of the neurobiological literature here, but outline some of the best studied circuits. It is important to reiterate that the neurobiology of fear is still in its infancy; there are many structures that likely play key roles, but about which we know very little. For instance, subdivisions of the habenula likely contribute to signaling fear-related information to brainstem nuclei, and provide signals about punishment or absence of reward to reward-learning systems [ 28 ]; parts of this pathway are highly conserved across vertebrates [ 29 ]. Stress and anxiety have also been reported to activate the lateral septum [ 30 ], although the precise and causal role of this structure remains rather unclear. None of these structures is commonly encountered in neurobiological studies of fear in humans.

The schematic outlines some of the processing that contributes to fear, including sensory inputs, central structures, and effectors. From [ 31 ].

Of course, the functional role of the participating brain structures depends on specific neurotransmitters and their receptors. This level of explanation has been informed by the actions of specific drugs, such as the anxiolytic effects of benzodiazepines. Of some interest have been drugs acting on serotonin reuptake transporters, a very widely prescribed class of agents for treating mood and anxiety disorders (such as the drug Prozac). There is some support for a classic theory of the differential actions of serotonin in facilitating anxiety but inhibiting panic [ 31 ]. Similar attention has also been devoted to another neuromodulator controlled by specific brainstem neurons: norepinephrine. A distinguishing feature of both the serotonergic and noradrenergic systems is that a relatively discrete population of neurons (in the dorsal raphe, and the locus ceruleus, respectively) innervates a wide swath of distal targets, making possible precisely the kind of global and coordinated effects on information processing that an emotional state like fear requires.

Perhaps the best understood axis of processing fear in the mammalian brain involves structures connected with the amygdala ( Figures 2 , ​ ,5). 5 ). At the cortical end, the most prominent of these is the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex, including cingulate cortex. At the other end are the hypothalamus, periaqueductal gray (PAG), and many brainstem nuclei as well as the intermediolateral cell column of the spinal cord and peripheral components of the autonomic nervous system. It is tempting to view the function of this assembly of structures in terms of the lower levels implementing emotional responses, and the cortical levels exerting modulatory control and regulation (see below). While such a view is not entirely inaccurate, it fails to capture the complexity of how these different structures implement fear -- in good part due to massive reciprocal interactions between all the components. For instance, the amygdala projects to the PAG and conversely. The amygdala is also reciprocally connected with prefrontal cortex, and concurrent recordings in both structures clearly show that there is no simple serial processing but a much more complex iterative flow of information [ 32 ]. Two other sets of structures that need to be incorporated into the scheme are parts of the basal ganglia involved in reward processing and instrumental behavior, and the insula, involved in interoception.

(A) Some of the main amygdala nuclei and their inputs and outputs, emphasizing the complex internal architecture of this structure. (B) Amygdala connectivity with other brain structures, emphasizing its participation in multiple networks that process fear, and its central location in mediating between parts of the prefrontal cortex and nuclei in the hypothalamus and brainstem. Modified from [ 69 ] and [ 120 ]. Abbreviations: MDm: dorsomedial thalamus, which mediates between amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex; Ca, Acc, P, VP: components of the basal ganglia (Caudate, Accumbens, Putamen, Ventral Pallidum); Ce, AB, B, L: nuclei of the amygdala (Central, Accessory Basal, Basal, Lateral); EC: entorhinal cortex.

Fear and the Amygdala

The basolateral amygdala receives most of the sensory inputs that specify fear associations (with the exception of olfactory input, which comes into the medial nucleus) and selective optogenetic activation of neurons within this nucleus is sufficient to associate the incoming sensory information with unconditioned fear responses [ 33 ] ( Figure 2 ). The central nucleus of the amygdala is widely considered the main output regulator for mediating fear responses, and these are in turn mediated by distinct subdivisions of the central nucleus. Whereas some of these neurons can inhibit cholinergic targets mediating cortical arousal (in the substantiainnominata, diagonal band of Broca, nucleus basalis), they can at the same time promote freezing through projections to the periaqueductal gray [ 34 ]. The flexible modulation of different downstream fear components by the central amygdala depends on an intricate inhibitory control balance internal to the amygdala [ 35 , 36 ].

Studies of the amygdala in humans have implicated this structure in the recognition [ 37 ], expression [ 38 ], and experience [ 39 ] of fear. However, in human neuroimaging studies it is activated not only in anxiety and phobia [ 40 ] but by a broad range of unpleasant or pleasant stimuli [ 41 – 43 ], including highly arousing appetitive stimuli such as sexual stimuli or one’s favorite music [ 44 , 45 ]. The enormous range of stimulus properties that have been reported to activate the amygdala has given way to views that try to provide a more unified picture. Such accounts typically acknowledge that the amygdala plays an important role in fear, but stop short of endorsing the claim that this is a basic function. Instead, they propose that it is merely one example of a broader and more abstract function, such as processing arousal, value, preference, relevance, impact, vigilance, surprise, unsigned prediction error, associability, ambiguity or unpredictability. The extent to which any of these functions are domain-specific (notably, in regard to processing social stimuli) remains an open question [ 46 ].

Much of this literature has interacted with the amygdala’s well-known role in memory [ 47 ] and attention [ 48 ], with the emerging possibility that the amygdala may play a more modulatory [ 49 ], developmental [ 50 ], and learning-related role [ 51 ], rather than a principal role in the on-line processing of fear. Somewhat relatedly, there has been a shift towards more network-based views of fear processing, in which structures such as the amygdala are nodes in an anatomically much more extended collection of structures [ 52 ]. This shift emphasizes the fact that the initial question was simply ill-posed: “what does the amygdala do?” is not a sensical query in the first place, because the amygdala in isolation does nothing; it all depends on the particular network in which it participates. This also points us towards a different view on the search for neuroimaging activation patterns specific to certain emotions: the circuits responsible may simply be too distributed to resolve using techniques such as fMRI.

As important as moving from the amygdala outwards to include it in larger networks is moving inwards to consider its internal components. Earlier work in rodents began to show that different amygdala nuclei are involved in different types of fear-related behaviors, such as innate responses to conditioned stimuli or actions to avoid them (e.g., [ 53 , 54 ]). However, whereas the earlier studies investigated these issues using bulk lesions of tissue (and generated some conflicting findings), it is now clear that the level of resolution required is at the level of specific neuronal subpopulations, often intermingled even within a single nucleus. Such subpopulations are distinguishable by a number of criteria, including the set of genes they express, their morphology, and most importantly their connectivity and electrophysiological properties whereby they subserve particular functions in processing fear. Current investigations of this issue use optogenetics to address this issue. In this technique, light-activated ion channels are expressed in specific neuronal subpopulations through their coupling to a promotor specific to that subtype (alternatively, one can also engineer ion channels gated by exogenous drugs that can then be administered experimentally). This is achieved best in transgenic mice, although it also possible to do it through focal injection of viruses, opening the door to such manipulations in monkeys as well. Optogenetic studies have demonstrated a tightly regulated network of inhibitory interneurons within the central nucleus that controls how sensory input (coming into the basolateral amygdala) can influence outputs to structures such as the hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray (e.g., [ 35 , 36 ]). This level of grain is impossible to investigate in humans so far, and poses a major challenge for how to interpret results from functional neuroimaging studies, which pool changes in blood-oxygenation-related activation over voxels several millimeters in size (typically, 15–20 cubic millimeters) over a timecourse of a few seconds.

As with midbrain and brainstem structures, the amygdala’s role in fear processing is highly conserved across species ranging from humans [ 55 ], to monkeys [ 56 , 57 ], rodents [ 58 , 59 ], and even reptiles [ 60 ], mirroring its conserved pattern of connectivity [ 61 ]. Sorely needed are systematic comparative studies that focus on specific structures and networks, and that map out the similarities and differences in functional components. For instance, the role of the amygdala in associative learning of fear appears to be ubiquitous across species; the set of unconditioned stimuli that it processes vary to some extent; and its role in the conscious experience of fear has been investigated only in humans [ 39 ].

Is Fear Adaptive?

Fear is commonly thought to have adaptive functions in terms of both cognition and behavioral response. Unlike reflexes and fixed-action patterns, the relationship between stimuli and behaviors mediated by fear is highly flexible and context-dependent (see “modulation of fear”, below). Indeed, this flexibility is part of what distinguishes emotions: they are “decoupled reflexes”, central states more akin to personality traits and dispositions. One feature that highlights this are the highly diverse yet integrated sets of psychophysiological, cognitive and behavioral changes that all serve as indices of a central state of fear ( Figure 3 ).

(A) Stimuli and behaviors related to fear, schematized in terms of their complexity and the degree of an organism’s involvement and control (regulation). Fear can be caused by a wide range of stimuli, from basic unconditioned stimuli to complex symbolic knowledge; and it can in turn trigger core biological responses as well as be modulated volitionally, at least in humans. Very roughly, the components at the upper left are shared across a wider range of species, whereas the components at the bottom right may be unique to humans. (B) Schematic of some of the effects of a central state of fear on cognition and processing mode. Fear interfaces with nearly all other aspects of cognition.

Yet one of the most prominent behavioral aspects of fear in humans remains of debated functional significance: facial expressions of fear. There is a vast literature regarding emotional facial expressions (probably the single most commonly used class of stimulus in human studies of emotion), with strong claims regarding their cultural universality or relativity, their biological primacy or social construction. But Darwin himself pointed out that emotional expressions could very well have evolved without having adaptive functions: they were, to use his phrase, “serviceable associated habits”, vestiges of behaviors that were once adaptive [ 17 ]. This claim is only partly true, however: it might pertain to such behaviors as emotional facial expressions, body postures, and alarm calls, but not to all fear behavior. And even these aspects of fear behavior are certainly adaptive. Their main functions have simply changed, and now they play a primary role in social communication rather than direct protection and defense [ 62 – 64 ]. There also are still residual adaptive functions of many of these expressive behaviors, which give us some insight into how they likely evolved. For instance, the wide eyes and flared nostrils typically associated with facial expressions of fear not only communicate fear to other viewers, but in fact alter sensory perception by increasing the eccentricity in the visual field of stimuli that can be detected, and increasing airflow through the nose so as to better detect olfactory cues [ 65 ].

The Modulation of Fear

A key current challenge is to assemble our knowledge at the level of individual structures, nuclei, and neuronal populations, to knowledge at the level of distributed large-scale networks (a challenge that pervades all of emotional and social neuroscience [ 66 ]). An emerging theme from such network concepts is that there are structures more concerned with directly orchestrating fear-related responses (e.g., PAG and hypothalamus), and structures more concerned with context-dependent modulation. Of particular interest for the latter have been prefrontal cortices, which some schemes have partitioned into orbital and medial networks, subserving processing of emotionally salient sensory stimuli and orchestrating of visceral emotional responses, respectively [ 67 ]; and into ventromedial and dorsolateral networks related to reward processing and cognitive control [ 68 ]. Moreover, such networks can be related to specific neurotransmitters and levels of action for pharmacological intervention [ 69 ]. The amygdala plays a key role in mediating between brainstem and cortical levels, with specific nuclei participating in distinct networks that may be similar across species [ 61 ]. Dissecting these networks and understanding their pharmacology, constitutes one of the main research components towards treating phobias and anxiety disorders [ 70 ].

The context-dependency of fear is seen in terms of the eliciting circumstances (e.g., flight available or not, which will elicit escape vs. freezing; Figure 4a ), type of threat (predator, conspecific, unknown), distance to the threat (and hence time; i.e., predatory imminence [ 20 ]), and time elapsed since a threat was encountered (resulting, in order, in behaviors such as active defense and flight, risk assessment, inhibition of movement, distancing). All of these have been described in some detail by ethologists working on fear in nonhuman animals [ 71 , 72 ], and emphasize the temporally extended and dynamic nature of a fear state that we noted earlier. There are many examples that networks within the medial prefrontal cortex play a key role in the modulation of fear-related processing, by projecting to targets such as the amygdala, hypothalamus, and brainstem. For instance, prefrontal regions are implicated in the extinction of conditioned fear responses, and lesions to ventromedial sectors of the prefrontal cortex in humans may actually exert a protective role in the acquisition of disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder [ 73 ].

Physical distance (proximity) is one of the most basic stimulus cues to trigger fear. (A) Different adaptive types of fear behaviors can be elicited as a function of distance, ranging from freezing to fleeing to defensive attack. Adapted from [ 74 ], see also [ 20 ] for a similar scheme. (B) Lesions of the human amygdala reduce interpersonal distance and the sense of invasion of personal space. At the top are schematized the mean interpersonal distances from an experimenter for healthy controls (left) and a patient with bilateral amygdala lesions (patient SM, right). At the bottom is a plot of the data showing mean distance that people felt comfortable standing from the experimenter (at the origin), patient SM is the red bar and the rest are healthy controls. From [ 91 ]. (C) Approach or retreat of a threatening stimulus (a tarantula) in a human fMRI study showed differential activation of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the striaterminalis. Participants lay inside the fMRI scanner while their foot was placed in compartments at varying distances from the tarantula, a procedure they observed through video (left panel). Subtraction of approach minus retreat (for the same distance, middle panel) resulted in the activation shown on the right panel. From [ 96 ].

Another example implicating the prefrontal cortex comes from studies of threat imminence: proximal predator threats require immediate flight; anticipations of dangerous future situations require long-term planning and control [ 20 , 74 ] (cf. below). These distinctions are mirrored in the neural structures that have been emphasized: brainstem and midbrain structures on the one hand, and forebrain, in particular prefrontal cortex, on the other [ 27 , 58 ]. Yet a strict dichotomy is probably inaccurate, and a better model may be to think of all “lower” structures as involved in both immediate and delayed responses, with the latter including more forebrain modulation; it has also become apparent that loops involving forebrain processing can be remarkably rapid [ 75 ].

An interesting line of work that ties together the themes of specific neurotransmitters (serotonin), prefrontal networks, and particular subtypes of fear comes from analyses of an animal’s control over a stressor. Uncontrollable stress has long been known to lead to more severe health consequences, and to specific behavioral adaptations such as “learned helplessness”. This behavior depends in part on serotonergic modulation via the dorsal raphe nucleus, but also requires input to the dorsal raphe from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to signal that a stressor is uncontrollable [ 76 ].

Responses and Stimuli Associated with Fear

There are many behavioral fear responses that can be used by conspecific observers to infer fear, and several of them have been quantified as behavioral markers of fear by human investigators (cf. Table 2 for a partial list). These include such laboratory measures as freezing (immobility), increased startle, and increased heart rate. More species-specific are alarm calls signaling danger, which are observed in species from monkeys [ 77 ] to rats [ 78 ] to birds [ 79 ]. Humans are relatively unique in their repertoire of emotional facial expressions (although chimpanzees, but not monkeys, can make such expressions as well, even though we generally do not know what they mean). In addition to behavioral responses and autonomic changes, there are effects of fear on nearly all aspects of cognition, ranging from attention to memory to judgment and decision-making ( Figure 3b ). Recent emphasis on the adaptive nature of emotions has studied how emotional states can influence decision-making, in particular an animal’s bias towards uncertainty and risk [ 80 ]. Systematic effects of putative fear states on choice behavior have been claimed even in bees [ 81 ].

Measures of fear in rodents (top) and humans (bottom).

The table is only a partial listing of the many behavioral measures that can be used to index fear and anxiety. Whereas the rodent tests are all behavioral, probes in humans encompass a smaller set of psychophysiological measures and a large set of self-report questionnaires (see [ 39 ] for details on these).

Similarly, we can think of several broad classes of prototypical fear-inducing stimuli [ 82 ]. There are those stimuli whose detection parameters have been set by evolution, for instance visual presentation of snakes or spiders in humans [ 83 ], or the odor of a fox for a ground squirrel. The bed nucleus of the striaterminalis has been implicated in unconditioned fear responses (freezing behavior) to a specific odor component of fox feces, trimethylthiazoline [ 84 ]. Then there are those stimuli that an organism has learned are dangerous through experience (or, in some species, social observation), as well as those stimuli that are not themselves dangerous but have been associated with the above two classes of stimuli and can thus serve as conditioned warning cues. It is for the first class of stimuli mentioned above that there are the strongest arguments for “modules” for fear processing: relatively encapsulated processing streams that are triggered rather rigidly by specific stimuli, over which we have little control, and that depend on some specialized neural structures [ 21 , 83 ]. However, most stimuli of which humans are afraid are probably learned socially [ 85 ], a mechanism also ubiquitous in other animals [ 86 ]. Learning about a harmful stimulus from another animal involves the amygdala, in both rats [ 87 ] and humans [ 88 ].

An interesting aspect of fear-associated behaviors are those actions taken not proactively but in order to terminate the state of fear itself: just as the anticipation of fear motivates behavior, so too does anticipation of its end. Cues associated with the cessation of fear can reinforce certain behaviors [ 89 ], suggesting a broader perspective in how fear behaviors unfold in time. Rather than thinking of a fear state as a static functional state, or as a fixed sequence triggered by a fear-inducing stimulus, we should conceive of it as a dynamic process. The duration of this process would extend from the cues that initiate it through to the stimuli encountered as it unfolds, the animal’s response, and its own perception of the interaction between the two, to the final reestablishment of homeostasis. While this makes things more complicated, it also imposes bounds, since specific structures come into play at certain points in time.

Distance and Intensity

One of the most prototypical of threat stimuli is an approaching predator ( Figure 4 ). This is a good example for the functionally specific organization of fear behaviors: animals typically respond with several distinct packages of adaptive behavior, depending on the distance. These range from freezing (to avoid being detected) to vocalization (to warn others or recruit help), to defensive attack. Such behaviors also show substantial differences between individuals and species: domestic as well as lab-reared wild rats tend to switch from freezing to escape when an experimenter is around 1–1.5 meters away, whereas wild trapped rats do so already at a mean distance of 2.5m [ 90 ].

A related stimulus attribute is intensity. Sudden-onset, or high intensity physical properties of stimuli in many cases elicit fear. To some extent, this can simply reflect the graded quality of fear cues, and of course intensity is often correlated with distance. Shrinking interpersonal distance and increasing sound intensity are two examples; in these cases both are known to activate the amygdala [ 91 , 92 ]. It has been known for some time that the different packages of fear behaviors that can be engaged at different distances or intensities (e.g., freezing versus fleeing) also engage different sets of neural structures [ 93 ], the details of which are now being uncovered. Columnar arrangements of neurons within the periaqueductal gray play an important role in these different components of fear responses, with more dorsal regions controlling active escape behaviors, and more ventral regions controlling inhibition (e.g., freezing) [ 94 ]. However, as we noted earlier, there are substantial ascending projections from the PAG as well, making the functional role of this brain region considerably more complex than a mere orchestration of emotion-related output.

Switches from passive to active fear responses (freezing to fleeing) are tightly dependent on distance from a predator [ 20 , 27 ], since different behaviors would be adaptive at different distances (e.g., possibility of evading detection versus need to engage). Neural correlates of such shifts have been observed in relation to several structures in addition to the PAG. The central nucleus of the amygdala can orchestrate switches between forebrain arousal and freezing in mice [ 34 ], and shifts from activation in the prefrontal cortex (distal threat) to PAG (proximal threat) have even been observed in human neuroimaging studies [ 95 ]. A related finding showed that activation in the bed nucleus of the striaterminalis correlated not with the sheer physical distance of threat (in that study, a tarantula), but with whether it was approaching or receding [ 96 ] ( Figure 4 ). Flexibility and learning in the elicitation of fear depends on plasticity and inhibitory control within the amygdala [ 35 ] as well as both ascending (e.g., from the PAG) and descending (e.g., from the prefrontal cortex) modulation. Exactly how an organism integrates sensory information together with its own coping ability in order to make the choice to switch from freezing to fleeing is a very rich question in the ecology of decision-making that deserves more study across species.

A major contextual factor in the evaluation of fear-inducing stimuli is whether or not escape might be possible, or whether the threat seems inescapable, a distinction related to the modulatory factor of control that we noted earlier. The former is typically associated with flight, whereas the latter is typically associated with freezing and defense ( Figure 4a ). This dimension can require substantial evaluation and amounts to ongoing monitoring and decision-making. The availability or unavailability of a place for concealment or escape has also been found to modulate the scenario-elicited fear behaviors of humans, in general quite in line with what would be predicted based on observations in rodents [ 2 ] (cf. Table 3 ). In broad terms, this category is related to an animal’s model of its ability to cope with a threat, an ingredient that has long been highlighted in human psychology by appraisal theories of emotion [ 97 ].

Other Stimulus Attributes

Another quite broad stimulus attribute that elicits fear is unpredictability. This can be a computationally more complex cue to detect, since it depends on comparisons of stimuli, or patterns of stimuli, over time. Several commonly used laboratory assays for fear, such as open-field tests, neophobia, and measures of latency to emerge from a secure nest, likely tap this category as well (cf. Table 2 ); the fear-related behaviors elicited are the complement of exploration. These fear-inducing attributes are found from mammals through zebrafish [ 98 ].

There are various types of unpredictability: temporal uncertainty in the occurrence of a stimulus, novelty of the stimulus itself, and even the context of knowing that one does not know much about a given stimulus [ 99 ]. One can identify at least two ways in which the occurrence of a stimulus is uncertain: there is a known probability (<1) associated with its presentation, an attribute economists refer to as “risk”, or there is uncertainty even about this probability (one does not know how risky it is), referred to as “ambiguity”. All of these aspects of unpredictability have been shown to activate the amygdala [ 100 , 101 ], and typically include a constellation of behaviors referred to as “risk assessment” that involve cautious sampling of the environment in order to obtain more information and reduce unpredictability.

An important category of fear-inducing stimuli are social. Animals can show strong fear behaviors in response to aggressive or dominant conspecifics. One common model of mood disorders in rodents is social defeat, a set of long-lasting submission-related behaviors induced by the inability to defend cage territory against the intrusion of an aggressive and dominant male. This social stimulus reliably elicits neuronal, endocrine, and immune changes indicative of anxiety, although longer-term effects are more akin to phenomena such as learned helplessness and depression [ 102 ]. Similar types of responses are found in other species ranging from zebrafish to humans. A specific category of fear arises when infant mammals are separated from their mother, a form of immediate separation anxiety connected with high-frequency (in many mammals, ultrasonic) distress vocalizations of the young; some theories have termed this type of fear “panic” to distinguish this system from other fear systems [ 12 ] (see also Box 3 ) and it can be modulated by specific genes as noted earlier [ 22 ]. In humans, social aspects of fear can be elicited by cues such as untrustworthy faces or invasion of personal space, all stimuli that reliably involve the amygdala [ 91 , 103 , 104 ].

Box 3. Psychopathology of fear

Despite the high inter-individual variability in fear responses, there are consistent patterns across time within an individual. That is, many aspects of fear and anxiety can usefully be characterized as traits, in humans as well as other animals [ 82 , 134 ]. As with moods in general, there is substantial heritability for trait anxiety, and for anxiety disorders, although it seems clear that most of the genetic variance is accounted for by complex polygenic interactions with environmental stressors, rather than by any single gene [ 135 ]. The decoupling between an immediate stimulus trigger and a fear state also makes trait anxiety prone to dysregulation: anxiety disorders constitute one of the most common psychiatric illnesses (all in all, close to 20% of the population suffers from an anxiety disorder of some kind in any given year [ 136 ]).

There are clinical distinctions between dysfunctions of fear processing that have some evidence for involvement of specific brain structures and neurotransmitter systems, making them candidates for functional subtypes of fear that will be reflected in the brain. Generalized anxiety disorder features chronic worry about a range of events, typically focused on the future. Panic disorder, on the other hand, results from a severe and acute fear response-- often in the absence of an ability to cope, such as the sensation of suffocation that can be experimentally induced by inhaling carbon dioxide (other experimental inducers of panic are intravenous administration of lactate or cholecystokinin). Phobias are characterized both by predictive anxiety as well as acute flight responses, often to specific classes of stimuli (e.g., spiders or snakes). Ever since Freud, anxiety disorders have been viewed as resulting from pathological suppression, repression or avoidance of fear-eliciting situations, thoughts, and stimuli [ 137 ]. The reasonable hypothesis based on such views is that treatment should emphasize exposure to fear-inducing stimuli, and access to fear-related thoughts and memories [ 138 , 139 ], essentially updating emotional information [ 140 ]. The psychological concepts related to anxiety and its treatment have been mapped onto behavioral processes such as adaptation and extinction, and onto their neural correlates [ 141 ], a thriving corpus of research in modern neuroscience.

There are alternative possibilities for how pathology might emerge from fear, not mutually exclusive with the above: it simply might represent an exaggerated fear reaction. Phobias would be an example. One plausible point in processing for such exaggeration to exert its effect would be at the earliest stage (a component that itself may involve learning: discrimination among stimulus properties that evoke conditioned fear becomes broader after aversive learning [ 142 ]). Thus, increased expectation of, and rumination about fear, can be associated with increased vigilance and attention to potentially dangerous stimuli [ 143 , 144 ]. The consequence is a generally heightened state of arousal, accompanied by many fear-like responses that can be thought of as false positives from a signal detection perspective. The threshold for detecting fear has simply been set too low and too many stimuli that have a very low probability of being dangerous are misinterpreted as dangerous [ 145 ]. One might wonder why pathological anxiety should be so prevalent at all. Is it so hard to set the right threshold? The solution is to realize the asymmetry between false negatives (which can result in death) and false positives (which, in isolation, often have few consequences). It is only when false positives cumulatively begin to impair daily functioning, or when their number increases as environmental circumstances change, that pathology becomes evident. An example illustrates the point [ 146 ]: You are a hunter-gatherer at a watering hole and hear a noise, which could be a lion. Suppose the cost of fleeing in panic is 200 calories, and the cost of engaging a lion is 200,000 calories. Some simple calculations show that you should flee in panic if the probability of the noise being a lion is 1/1000 or greater. Which means that 999/1000 times you are panicking with no lion, i.e., you have a false positive.

There is yet another view regarding pathological states of fear: that they arise from the operation of a module that is relatively impenetrable to control, operates relatively automatically, and has been tuned by evolution. All these features could render such a module not only difficult to override, but also responsive to stimuli in a way that would have been adaptive in our ancestral environment but may no longer be so. This view is supported by responses to so-called “prepared stimuli”, objects such as snakes and spiders that are the most common targets of specific phobias and that can be more easily conditioned (or, indeed, need not be conditioned at all) to produce fear [ 83 ]. Another distinguishing feature of such fear modules typically is the proposal that they can operate, to some extent, outside conscious awareness of the eliciting stimuli (cf. Box 2 ).

Animals can also show fear in response to subtle cues picked up from the fear induced in another conspecific; these can be innate (e.g., chicks respond to alarm calls), an example of social learning (e.g., infant monkeys can learn from fear behaviors of adults [ 105 ]), or involve unknown social signals (e.g., rats placed in contact with other rats who experienced electric shock show amygdala activation [ 87 ]). Somewhat the flip side of increasing sound intensity that we noted above, sudden cessation of background sounds can be a social signal of fear in rodents as well [ 106 ]. In zebrafish, injured fish release a chemical that functions as an alarm signal: when detected by other fish, it causes a graded increase in fast swimming behavior [ 107 ]. Social communication of fear is even seen in crickets (in response to spiders) [ 108 ]. Another good example from invertebrates is the emission of carbon dioxide by Drosophila when flies encounter an innate fear-evoking stimulus such as electric shock. This odor can evoke avoidance behaviors in other flies, thus serving as a social signal, and is processed by a highly specific neural circuit [ 109 ]. A class of social stimuli that commonly induces anxiety and is likely unique to humans is public evaluation, such as when one is forced to give a public speech; this potent scenario is in fact used experimentally to induce anxiety (e.g., the Trier Social Stress Test).

One intriguing class of stimuli that can trigger states of panic are interoceptive signals. In particular, signals related to suffocation and panting are known to be represented in the periaqueductal gray [ 110 ] and the amygdala. There is a specific pH-sensitive ion channel expressed on neurons within the amygdala that may directly sense acidosis due to rising carbon dioxide levels [ 111 ]. Other examples would include strong interoceptive signals of major homeostatic imbalance, or organ failure (e.g., a heart attack, or a stroke). It remains relatively unclear to what extent direct interoceptive signals about such events can be used to trigger fear, and to what extent fear is instead triggered more derivatively by secondary consequences and background knowledge (at least in humans).

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that humans stand out from other animals in having fear and anxiety triggered not by occurrent stimuli, but merely by thinking about such stimuli. The bulk of psychopathology arises from worrying about what could happen and what might be, often to the point of distorting what actually is. This aspect of fear induction in humans probably also contributes to the impression we have that fear depends very much on conscious experience.

Conscious Experience of Fear

Clearly, different instances of fear and anxiety do all feel similar, and we categorize and verbally describe them as similar. This fact must be reflected both in psychology and neurobiology. At the psychological level, two sets of theories have attempted to incorporate the diversity of stimuli, situations, and behaviors related to fear, on the one hand, with their apparent psychological and subjective unity, on the other. The first such theory is appraisal theory, a theory about the adaptive functional role which fear is thought to accomplish. Older theories that had lists of functional evaluations [ 97 ] have been advanced with more recent accounts that relate specific stimulus evaluation checks to specific points in a processing sequence [ 112 ]. The second psychological theory is the conceptual act theory [ 6 , 14 , 113 ]. According to this constructivist framework, our experience of fear, and certainly our reports of having fear (and any other emotion), are a highly cognitive synthesis. The synthesis begins with an initial core affective state (that is perhaps no more finely differentiated than along dimensions of arousal and valence [ 4 ], two dimensions frequently thought to capture much of the variance across emotions [ 16 ]) and then incorporates not only interoceptive and somatic knowledge of the state of one’s body and of one’s actions, but also of the context-dependent situation, knowledge stored in memory, and much explicit information stored in language and acquired in a particular culture. Emotion categories such as fear are then seen as highly constructed, rather than as biological primitives (cf. Box 1 ). A major challenge for future work will be to elucidate the neural substrates of these psychological components, and to probe whether anything similar can be found perhaps in nonhuman primates or whether this aspect of fear is unique to humans.

While this review advocates a broadly comparative and functional approach to fear, there is no reason to exclude the conscious experience of fear. Instead, it seems timely to incorporate modern theories of consciousness into the study of emotion, including the study of fear in nonhuman and hence nonverbal animals [ 12 , 114 ]. There are several advantages to doing so. First and foremost, it would seem compelling to try to incorporate what laypeople find the most salient component of a state of fear. We already know that healthy humans feel fear, that such feelings are the main basis for complaint in psychiatric anxiety disorders, and that they are abolished by lesions of the amygdala [ 39 ]. It is a perfectly respectable scientific question now to ask whether monkeys, rats, reptiles or flies have feelings of fear, although it requires some dissection of components of feeling fear ( Box 2 ). Of course, we could not approach this question in the same way that we typically do in humans (by using language and asking). Instead, we would need to use other measures that all require some neurobiological theory of consciousness. But something like this has already been done for other types of conscious content: for instance, patients who cannot answer any questions, and who cannot respond behaviorally in any way, show brain activation in response to verbal instructions that is very similar to the activation seen in healthy, conscious people (in that study, instruction to imagine playing tennis activated brain regions normally associated with such mental imagery, for instance [ 115 ]). This allowed the authors of that study to infer that the patients were conscious, in the absence of any behavioral measure. Extending such an approach to nonhuman species requires a broader theory of consciousness, but the basic idea is no different in principle. There are in fact several modern theories of consciousness that are functionally congenial to understanding the conscious experience of fear, and that offer testable neurobiological hypotheses.

Box 2. Conscious and unconscious fear

There is a large literature investigating the role of consciousness in fear, but it is heterogeneous in regard to the content of that conscious experience. Some studies have shown that stimuli that communicate or trigger fear can do so even when perception of those stimuli is subliminal, at least to some degree, a mechanism that appears to involve the amygdala (good evidence; [ 129 , 130 ]). Others have claimed that such nonconscious fear processing depends on a particular subcortical route of input to the amygdala that typically bypasses cortex (debated; [ 75 , 131 , 132 ]).

More controversial is the possibility of unawareness of the feeling of fear itself, rather than just of the eliciting stimuli. However, non-conscious emotions have been proposed as a possibility based on some psychological experiments [ 133 ]. Regardless of the empirical status of these dissociations, they highlight the different components of an experience of fear: one can be aware of the eliciting stimuli and circumstances (often the object towards which the fear is directed behaviorally); one can be conscious of the bodily changes that accompany fear; one can be conscious of one’s ability to act in response to and cope with the fear-eliciting situation; one can be conscious of one’s change in cognition; and one can be conscious of many associated thoughts and background knowledge related to fear [ 14 ]. When people report that they feel afraid, they could be reporting on their awareness of any number of these components.

Three such theories are focused, respectively, on the information-conveying nature of conscious experiences [ 116 , 117 ] (integrated information theory), on their ubiquitous functional consequences [ 118 ] (global workspace theory), and on their subjectivity [ 23 , 24 , 119 ] (theories of subjectivity and the self). The reader is referred to the original references for further description of these theories, but each of them makes neurobiological predictions. Briefly, these theories could relate to our investigation of fear as follows.

The integrated information theory proposes that a specific conscious experience conveys a very high amount of information, since it is distinct from so many other experiences and yet typically integrates very many component attributes [ 116 , 117 ]. Thus, all the different shades of feeling fear should correspond to informationally distinct, yet richly integrated, brain states at the neuronal level. This would put an upper bound on the number of distinct fear experiences (or emotion experiences more generally) that any organism could experience, deriving from the complexity of the neural systems instantiating fear. Presumably, the addition of further cortical territory into the representation of fear in humans allows for much more nuanced and elaborate experiences of fear [ 14 ]. There are some efforts underway to estimate integrated information in the brain (a very difficult problem) from measures such as EEG.

With respect to the second popular theory, global workspace theory, a conscious state of fear has access to a vast number of other cognitive and behavioral processes [ 118 ], with the result that fear modulates attention, memory, perception, and decision-making. The theory often appeals to nuclei in the thalamus that have the requisite wide connectivity, but the connectivity of the amygdala could also support such a network in the case of fear [ 48 , 120 ], and may explain why focal lesions to this structure can abolish the ability to feel fear, at least in humans [ 39 ].

Finally, harking back to William James’ original insight [ 7 ], the content of our conscious experience of fear includes interoceptive information about the state of our body and mind, and requires some degree of self-representation [ 23 , 24 , 119 ]. The subjectivity of feeling afraid requires not only a subject to experience the fear, but also to a good extent specifies why fear feels the way that it does, at the same time providing the organism with information about its homeostatic state, its state of preparedness to cope with an environmental challenge, and motivating it to engage in instrumental behavior. These components have been hypothesized to depend on regions of the brain that map interoceptive information, such as the insula and anterior cingulate cortex [ 23 , 25 ]. This view also makes the strong prediction that species without interoception cannot feel fear -- a conjecture that remains entirely unexplored. One intriguing possibility is that a readout of the neuronal representation of fear in interoceptive structures such as the insula might in principle provide neuroscientists with the same information that it provides to the subject feeling fear. This could allow a direct link between psychological theories of emotion that place a premium on our experience of them, on the one hand, and neurobiological substrate, on the other. In a sense, it would resurrect William James’ original idea, but use the brain’s representation of the emotion itself rather than attempt to measure all the varied somatic correlates of the emotion.

Conclusions and Open Challenges

There is no single brain structure for processing fear, and even a small set of necessary and sufficient structures has not emerged. One likely reason that it has been difficult to find clear evidence of a dedicated fear circuit from fMRI studies in humans [ 10 ] is that it is now apparent that rather different emotional behaviors, ranging from defense to aggression to mating, are controlled by specific populations of neurons that are spatially within the same structure and hence unresolvable using fMRI (e.g., [ 35 , 121 , 122 ]). Much the same is true of value encoding in general: neurons within the amygdala encoding positive or negative reinforcement appear to be closely intermingled, making their visualization with typical fMRI approaches problematic [ 123 ]. Another reason is that fear evoked by different classes of stimuli (unpredictability, social, predators, etc.) may be processed by partly separable neural systems [ 21 , 124 ]. There is better evidence, and more reason to believe a priori , that extended systems comprised of a network of structures could be identified. Some fMRI studies have suggested this, and several models have been proposed [ 12 , 27 ]. Ultimately, we may need to redraw the boundaries of the component structures, however: networks for processing fear will consist of specific subpopulations of cells extended across an array of structures.

How is it that I can tell my cat is afraid? Typically, I figure this out from all evidence available, which includes the current situation (are there fear-inducing stimuli or context) and the animal’s behavior. Darwin’s detailed observation of emotional behaviors in babies, adult humans, dogs, cats, and other animals demonstrated that many behaviors were remarkably similar across species [ 125 ]. Of course, there are also differences between species, differences between individuals, and things are vastly more complex in humans than in a mouse. But comparative as well as developmental observations suggest that a fruitful starting point is to begin with a primitive concept of fear that is shared across mammals (or even more broadly than that), and then investigate the variations on this theme. The neurobiological evidence is then one additional piece of evidence, supplementing the behavioral and situational clues, and allowing us to begin constructing causal links between these.

In humans, there is of course another component of fear: its conscious experience. A complete program for the scientific study of fear will need to go hand-in-hand with the development of neurobiological and functional theories of conscious experience. The questions are extremely challenging to answer, but they are questions that make sense and are interesting to try to answer. At what level of phylogeny does the feeling of fear become incorporated into its neural representation? Why? (what happened in evolution to make it adaptive to have this added component?). What components of fear constitute the contents of its conscious experience? Do we have any control over which components of fear we can become aware of? (can we train ourselves to become more or less aware of feeling fear?)

Three prominent challenges for the future, then, map onto methods, cross-species comparisons, and investigation of the conscious experience of fear. The first will require the combination of single-neuron measurements and manipulations at the level of optogenetics with a much larger field-of-view (ultimately, a whole-brain field-of-view). The second will require funding and research consortia that investigate fear across a range of different species, paying close attention to ecologically validity, especially in experiments with humans. The third will require close interface with people working on consciousness, and more precise hypotheses regarding the neurobiology of consciousness. All three taken together may constitute the future science of fear.

Acknowledgments

I thank Michael Davis, Dean Mobbs, Adam Anderson, Lisa Barrett, Jaak Panksepp, Shuo Wang and Geoff North for providing many helpful comments and no consensus. I am especially indebted to David Anderson for comments and discussions that have considerably shaped the conceptual aspects of this review. Supported in part by grants from NIMH.

Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

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Definition of fear

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of fear  (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

intransitive verb

• alarum
• fearfulness
• trepidation

fear , dread , fright , alarm , panic , terror , trepidation mean painful agitation in the presence or anticipation of danger.

fear is the most general term and implies anxiety and usually loss of courage.

dread usually adds the idea of intense reluctance to face or meet a person or situation and suggests aversion as well as anxiety.

fright implies the shock of sudden, startling fear.

alarm suggests a sudden and intense awareness of immediate danger.

panic implies unreasoning and overmastering fear causing hysterical activity.

terror implies the most extreme degree of fear.

trepidation adds to dread the implications of timidity, trembling, and hesitation.

Examples of fear in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fear.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English fer, going back to Old English fǣr, fēr "unexpected danger, peril," going back to Germanic *fēra- or *fēran- (whence also Old Saxon fār "lurking danger," Old High German fāra "ambush, danger," Old Norse fár "evil, mischief, plague"), perhaps going back to a lengthened-grade nominal derivative of a proposed Indo-European verbal base *per- "test, risk" — more at peril entry 1

Note: Attested in Gothic only in the presumed derivative ferja, translating Greek enkáthetos "one put in secretly, spy." Though the etymology proposed above is conventional in dictionaries, the original meaning of the Germanic etymon and its relation to a putative Indo-European *per- are uncertain. See note at peril entry 1 . The meaning of the Middle and Modern English noun appears to be derivative of the verb (see fear entry 2 ) rather than a development of the Old English meaning.

Middle English feren "to frighten, be afraid of," going back to Old English fǣran, fēran "to take by surprise, frighten," weak verb derivative (as also Old Saxon fāron "to lurk in wait for, frighten," Old High German fārēn "to lurk in wait for, strive, devise ill against," Old Norse færa "to slight, taunt") of Germanic *fēra- or *fēran- — more at fear entry 1

12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at transitive sense 3

Phrases Containing fear

• fear for one's / someone's life
• in fear for one's life
• fear for one's life
• fools rush in (where angels fear to tread)
• fear the worst
• put the fear of God into (someone)
• in fear for one's / someone's life
• for fear of
• in fear of one's life
• go where others fear to tread
• strike fear into one's heart
• strike fear into the hearts of
• live in fear
• without fear of contradiction
• fear of the unknown

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Cite this entry.

“Fear.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fear. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of fear.

Kids Definition of fear  (Entry 2 of 2)

Medical Definition

Medical definition of fear, more from merriam-webster on fear.

Nglish: Translation of fear for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of fear for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about fear

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By Phil Barker

July 2003  

What Is Fear?

Fear is "an unpleasant and often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger."[1] Fear is completely natural and helps people to recognize and respond to dangerous situations and threats. However, healthy fear -- or fear which has a protective function -- can evolve into unhealthy or pathological fear, which can lead to exaggerated and violent behavior.

Dr. Ivan Kos lays out several different stages of fear. The first is real fear, or fear based on a real situation. If someone or something hurts you, you have a reason to fear it in the future. Second is realistic, or possible fear. This is fear based in reality that causes a person to avoid a threat in the first place (i.e. waiting to cross a busy road for safety reasons). Next, exaggerated or emotional fear deals with an individual "recalling past fears or occurrences and injecting them into a current situation."[2] This type of fear is particularly relevant to conflict. Emotional fear affects the way people handle conflictual situations.

Causes of Fear

Conflict is often driven by unfulfilled needs and the fears related to these needs. The most common fear in intractable conflict is the fear of losing one's identity and/or security . Individuals and groups identify themselves in certain ways (based on culture, language, race, religion, etc.) and threats to those identities arouse very real fears -- fears of extinction, fears of the future, fears of oppression, etc.

For many people, the world is changing rapidly and their lives are being altered as a result. For some religious people, this change leads to the fear that young people will abandon the Church or Mosque, that the media will become more important and influential in the lives of their children, and that they are losing control of their own future. These threats to identity result in fear.[3]

Similarly, in many ethnic conflicts, a history of " humiliation , oppression, victimhood , feelings of inferiority, persecution of one's group, and other kinds of discrimination" lead to a fear of similar wrongdoing in the future.[4] These historical memories shape how groups and people see each other. As a result, historical violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Hutus and Tutsis, and Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland affects how these groups look at one another and often leads to fear of one another. Group fears often translate into individual fears, as group extinction is often associated with individual extinction.

These examples illustrate the important role that history plays in the development of fear. Memories of past injustices lead individuals to anticipate future oppression or violence with a sense of anxiety and dread.

Why Fear Matters

Fear is a very important factor in intractable conflict. Emotions like fear can often cause extreme and seemingly irrational behavior in people, which can result in escalating conflict. According to James F. Mattil, the Managing Editor of Flashpoints: Guide to World Conflict, "The common thread that weaves violent political movements together is fear. It is not the only motivating factor behind political violence, nor necessarily the most obvious, but it is virtually always there. Whenever we ask why people hate, or why they are willing to kill or die for a cause, the answer is invariably fear."[5]

People are social in nature, with shared values, religion, tradition, language, etc. Whenever the basic characteristics that tie a group together are threatened, the group will fear for its survival. As a result, the group will also attempt to get rid of the threat, sometimes through distorted or violent means.

History plays an important role in this process. Historical experiences shape how groups view threats. If a group has been hurt or wounded in the past, it affects their outlook today. For example, historical tensions and wrongdoing affect the way Israelis and Palestinians see each other today. Oftentimes, history is exaggerated -- meaning one group is portrayed as extremely heroic and another group portrayed as barbarian or inhuman. This in turn leads to more mistreatment, as it is easier to abuse or hurt a group that has been dehumanized . A cycle develops--someone is hurt, resulting in fear and the demonization of the person or group that hurt them. This, in turn, makes it easier for future wrongdoing to occur.

It is also important to note the impact that elites , or leaders, have on fear and conflict. Oftentimes, leaders use fear to their political advantage. Leaders need support from those they lead, and one way to gain this support is by playing on the fears of the people. Leaders in Northern Ireland can use the fear of either the Protestants or the Catholics to their own political advantage. Many have asserted that George Bush used the fear of another 9-11 to support the second U.S. war in Iraq. Leaders can even intentionally deepen these fears for their own purposes. Doing so can aggravate the already existing fears and lead to future difficulties.[6]

Dealing with Fear

Individuals: There are many ways of approaching fear in the context of conflict. However, since fear is such a personal issue, most approaches focus on the individual. There are various ways to deal with your own fear, including

• becoming aware of it,
• identifying the ways you express fear
• recognizing the situations which trigger fear, and
• using behavioral techniques to reduce fear and stress.[7]

In order to overcome fears, individuals and groups must first come to terms with their own fears and understand just how destructive they can be. However, it is equally important to be aware of others' fears. Being aware of other people's fear allows you to deal with it appropriately. One of the most effective ways of handling the fear of others is through empathy, or seeing things from the other person's perspective. Once one does that, one can recognize actions of one's own that might be unnecessarily causing fear on the other side. By toning down one's language, or clarifying one's interests and needs, it is possible to dispel unwarranted fears, thereby helping the other side feel more secure. Empathy is also important in any attempt at reconciliation or mediation because it helps to foster a positive interaction between people.[8] It is also important to share your own fears so that others can empathize with you in return, and alter their behavior in ways that will lessen that fear as well.

Officials: Public support is essential for political leaders. One way leaders can gain this support is by addressing, playing off of, or even causing the fears of his or her people. As a result, leaders can play an important role in the creation and/or calming of fears, particularly in ethnic or inter-group conflicts. It is important that leaders are aware of the consequences of using fear as a motivational tool. Because fear is such a powerful emotion, leaders must be extremely cautious about playing on the fears of people. The former Yugoslavia is a perfect example of how the fears of the people can be used by leaders for power. Serb leaders often played on Serb fears in order to strengthen their power and to push people to do things they might otherwise have refused to do.[9] Contrast this with the very famous quote of Franklin Roosevelt: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." This is an overstatement...fear can be real and justified, but it is far too dangerous to exploit for other aims.

Third Parties: Mediators and third parties can play an important part in helping people to overcome their fears. By understanding the ways in which fear can create and escalate conflict, third parties can address these issues in a constructive manner. One way this can be accomplished is by assuring that people on both sides of a conflict feel that their individual needs and fears are being addressed. Oftentimes this is done through no-fault discussions, wherein people are not allowed to discuss who is wrong in a situation, but only ways in which they may move toward a peaceful resolution. Neither side should have to sacrifice in areas that they consider to be an important need or fear. Solutions must always "satisfy fundamental needs and allay deepest fears."[10]

It is also important to remember that an issue such as identity and the fears associated with it are not zero-sum . In other words, the calming of one group's fear does not necessarily mean that another group has more reason to fear. Usually quite the opposite is true. The more secure one group feels, the less they feel a need to attack other groups. Thus security can actually be a win-win or positive sum game: the more one side has, the more the other side has too. This is true from the bully on the playground...who is usually an insecure child, to the bully in the international system.

Through empathy and understanding, groups in conflict can learn about the fears and needs of others and, in the process, overcome their own fears as well.

[1] Merriam-Webster Online [book on-line] (accessed 7 March 2003); available from http://www.webster.com ; Internet.

[2] Paul Wahrhaftig, Belgrade Combating Fear Project [article on-line] (accessed 11 March 2003); available from http://www.conflictres.org/vol181/belgrade.html ; Internet.

[3] James F. Mattil, What in the Name of God?: Fundamentalism, Fear & Terrorism [article on-line] (accessed 7 March 2003); available from http://www.flashpoints.info/issue-briefings/Analysis%20&%20Commentary/Analysis-Religion-main.htm  ; Internet.

[4] Steve Utterwulghe, Rwanda's Protracted Social Conflict: Considering the Subjective Perspective in Conflict Resolution Strategies [article on-line] (accessed 7 March 2003); available from http://www.trinstitute.org/ojpcr/2-3utter.htm ; Internet.

[5] James F. Mattil, What in the Name of God?: Fundamentalism, Fear & Terrorism [article on-line] (accessed 7 March 2003); available from http://www.flashpoints.info/issue-briefings/Analysis%20&%20Commentary/Analysis-Religion-main.htm  ; Internet.

[6] Herbert Kelman, "Social-Psychological Dimensions of International Conflict," in Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques, eds. I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997), 197.

[7] **Endnote missing (will add later).

[8] Herbert Kelman, "Social-Psychological Dimensions of International Conflict," in Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques, eds. I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997), 199.

[9] Anthony Oberschall, The manipulation of ethnicity: from ethnic cooperation to violence and war in Yugoslavia [article on-line] (accessed 13 March 2003); available from http://www.unc.edu/courses/2002fall/soci/326/039/manipulation-of-ethnicity.pdf ; Internet.

[10] Herbert Kelman, "Social-Psychological Dimensions of International Conflict," in Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques, eds. I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997), 197.

Use the following to cite this article: Barker, Phil. "Fear." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: July 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/fear >.

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Definition Essay: The Importance Of Fear In Schools

Show More What are we doing here? Why are we here? While you may not ask these questions everyday as you make your way to school, we are here because of fear. Fear, well, what fear? It is the fear of failure. We fear that without an education, we wouldn’t be able to get a proper, good-paying job, despite the fact that we constantly complain about how boring school actually is and whine when piled under mountains of homework and assignments. You’d rather be anywhere but here, and you are always free to leave - but you don’t. In fact, you are free to make your own decisions in life, but then again, they all have consequences. You have to pay if you make a bad choice, and so you just don’t make bad choices. But it’s not that simple, and this is all because of fear . Fear influences the actions that we make everyday, whether we like it or not. (48 seconds) …show more content… We avoid things and situations that seem dangerous to us. For example, people have a fear of snakes and spiders, because humans evolved alongside these dangerous creatures. Chapman University’s “Survey on American Fears” found that 51% of Americans are afraid of snakes, while 30% are afraid of spiders. We fear things that don’t seem natural, even if it is part of nature, such as these creepy-crawlies. Having an “abnormal” amount of legs may seem scary, or perhaps even a 100 legs. We all fear different

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