Feared
Fear is a negatively valenced emotional state arising in response to perceived dangers or threats. The experience of fear is associated with a range of physiological and psychological changes and with behavioral reactions such as fight-or-flight responses and immobilization, sometimes known as the freeze response. Fear can arise in response to present stimuli, to anticipated events, and to imagined situations. Many internalizing psychopathologies are intimately associated with dysfunctional levels of fear, including depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and specific phobias.
Fear is often understood as a distinct product of evolution. This hypothesis, however, has increasingly been contested on the grounds that the psychological, (neuro)physiological, and behavioral traits associated with fear consistently overlap with other negative, highly arousing emotional states, including anger, sadness, disgust, and anxiety. It is more defensible to claim that evolution produces flexibility, or the capacity of animals to address their circumstances and change their bodily states by evoking various behaviors, including the human linguistic use of concepts like fear to describe their internal states. Human concepts of fear, along with other negative emotions, are inextricably linked to culture, social context, and trait-level differences. Both other vertebrates and invertebrates are routinely observed as expressing fear, although researchers have noted challenges in applying the concept of fear, developed primarily to describe human experience, to non-human animals. At the same time, neuroscientists have critiqued the view that fear is an inherent faculty of less evolved and more animalistic parts of the brain—distinct from higher, more evolved, more human cognition—as having no basis in neurobiology. Neural structures associated with emotion in vertebrates are in fact fully integrated into the dynamic, non-hierarchical cognitive systems by which animals, both human and non-human, address the complex situations in which they find themselves.
Similar Artists