Fear Factor: Why do we get scared?

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to turn my mind to a topic that is as old as humankind itself: FEAR! It’s one of our basic emotions, yet we don’t always seem to understand what underlies it. So let’s have a closer look at this and see what fear is and when it occurs.

As I said, fear is a basic emotion that all babies express in their very early days when they encounter a situation where they feel helpless and unprotected to some danger, so it’s largely a survival instinct, passed through the generations. Of course, that doesn’t mean that seeing someone else experience fear from an object won’t make you scared in return from that same object… In fact, this is how a large proportion of phobias emerge. You go through (or witness) some form of psychological and/or physical trauma and because of that aversive event, your brain makes the association between the event and the negative outcome. And because pain=bad, you then learn to avoid things related to that event in order not to feel the nasty reaction (pretty much instrumental conditioning in a nutshell). For example, you’ll see that most people with a dog phobia will fear dogs because of that largely exaggerated thought of being attacked or bitten rather than the dog itself.

We all seem to regard fear as a sign of weakness, hence a bad thing. However, it can often be used to help you learn an important lesson. Take fairy tales for example: most of them have quite disturbing plots when you think about it as an adult (especially the Grimm Brothers‘). I mean, seriously: two kids, ditched by their father and evil stepmother in the middle of a forest, being fed by a cannibalistic witch in a remote house, only to violently kill her later by pushing her into the oven. What the hell were people thinking back then?! Of course, there are far darker examples (I still get shivers down my spine when I think about ‘Bluebeard’) but scaring your kids with fairy tales should not be seen as a pointless activity in any case.  They say that when we’re kids, we’re more scared by images rather than ideas but this gradually reverses as we become adults. Scary fictional stories have actually been used throughout the centuries in order to help get a point across or teach children vital lessons about life. If your children grow up in a protective bubble their entire life, they will never be ready to confront the dangers and harshness of the real world.

Alright, time for some biology stuff now! The part of the brain responsible for our fear regulation is called the amygdala. It’s situated in the lower part of the brain and has not evolved significantly since the development of Homo sapiens. This proves that it’s a more primal structure, often related to our subconscious responses to certain objects. For instance, if you see a creepy spider, crawling next to your finger, your amygdala would send a super-fast response to your motor system so that you can get your fingers away from the feared object as quickly as possible. All of this happens in less than a second and we often can’t control it.

The famous author Stephen King delineates 3 types of fear. The first type is the ‘gross-out‘ where we react to something diseased or morbid with a natural sense of disgust. The second type is ‘horror‘ which is our response to something unnatural (e.g. seeing a ghost). The third type is ‘terror‘ which is hard to describe but it generally denotes our behaviour towards something vague or downright ambiguous. A very good example for this are masks. As some psychologists have put it – the facial disguise temporarily eliminates the part of the body which reveals our emotions and attitudes. When you can’t read emotions, your brain doesn’t know what to expect and tenses up. And then you wonder why so many people are scared of clowns…

Conclusion time! It’s true that fear is nothing new to scientific research. There’s still much to discover about it though. We now know that scaring someone can also be useful in terms of preparing them for the same (or even worse) situations later on in life, as it’s the case with fairy tales. Well, as long as it’s moderate, so please don’t go scaring the s**t out of your cat or 3-year-old daughter with a creepy Halloween mask unless you want them to be delightfully traumatised for the rest of their days!

The Dark Ages of Psychology [Part 3]

Just to warn you – this post is rated S for Scary! Make sure to read parts 1 and 2 on my blog if you think you’re not man enough for this one. Anyway, what I’ll present in this topic is yet another classic experimental case in the early years of psychology, where ethical procedures and consideration for any consequences was nobody’s business. The following is the real story of a baby named Albert.

It’s 1920 and you’re an infant. You’re brought to a small room. An unknown man puts a live white laboratory rat in front of you. You’re curious and want to touch it. In a few seconds, however, you hear a loud banging noise behind you and you start crying. When you calm down, you start moving around the room. You encounter the same white rat and still want to explore it more so you start crawling towards it. But there it is again – that awful noise as of something metallic is banging nearby. Crying ensues… This repeats itself for quite some time. At the end of many sessions like that, every time you see the white rat, you suddenly don’t feel the need to touch it. Instead, you are frightened to death by it for some reason and start crying. Weird, huh?

This is the point where you, the readers, might ask yourselves “How does this story explain anything? And why is baby Albert suddenly afraid of the white rat?”. Well, does the term conditioning remind you of anything? Although I have already mentioned what conditioning is in my post “Nostalgia or The power of associative memory“, I will try to refresh your memory. It’s a psychological phenomenon whereby one stimulus is paired together with another stimulus. The more you experience these stimuli together (or one immediately following the other), the more your brain makes the association between them. In other words, after you experience stimulus A, it will remind you of stimulus B even if stimulus B is not present anymore (nostalgia is a good example here).

In the case of baby Albert, stimulus A was the white rat and stimulus B was the banging noise. After many trials of experiencing A and B together, baby Albert’s mind formed a connection between them and every time he saw the rat, it reminded him of the annoying noise. Therefore, only seeing the rat later on was enough for him to trigger that connection, even without the noise actually being there. Please tell me that makes sense, don’t wish to repeat myself! If you want a more detailed explanation, I’d recommend checking out this YouTube video of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52OhsWT-9JY

The leading psychologist behind this experiment (John Watson) exposed the baby to other stimuli such as a rabbit, a Santa Claus mask and a burning newspaper. The main aim for the study was to explore if a phobia towards a specific object can be conditioned in an otherwise normally functioning infant. Well, I think we can all draw the conclusion of what the results were… Phobias can be conditioned quite easily but treating them through de-conditioning and extinction is a harder process. You know, I just feel bad for Albert’s mother who, at least technically speaking, gave consent to have her son psychologically traumatised from an early age. And she was actually in the room with him…

Conditioning was known to psychology before little Albert’s case. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? Ha, ha,…ha. Hope you got the joke there! For those who are not quite sure what I am referring to, it’s the name of Ivan Pavlov – a Russian psychologist who rose to fame after conducting an experiment in the 1900s where he conditioned dogs to produce more saliva just by hearing a bell. And yes, he did this by pairing stimulus A (bell or light) with stimulus B (food). Just to let you know about the more technical terms – stimulus A would be called neutral stimulus (at the initial stage), stimulus B would be called unconditioned stimulus. After a significant time of pairing the two, stimulus A alone would have become the conditioned stimulus. There’s different types of conditioning but don’t want to bore you with more facts now.

Seems like you can condition someone to just about anything really. Is that ethical though? Well, most of the times no. However, if you use it for good purposes (let’s say training your German Shepherd to do some tricks for a reward), it should be harmless because it’s definitely a process of learning new connections between objects or events.