Fear

Fear is an unpleasant feeling of perceived risk or danger, whether it be real or imagined. Fear also can be described as a feeling of extreme dislike to some conditions/objects, such as: fear of darkness, fear of ghosts, etc. It is one of the basic emotions.

Fear may underlie some phenomena of behavior modification, although these phenomena can be explained without adducing fear as a factor in them. Furthermore, application of aversive stimuli is also often ineffective in producing change in the behaviour intended to be changed. Fearing objects or contexts can be learned; in animals this is being studied as fear conditioning, which depends on the emotional circuitry of the brain.

Fear inside a person has different degrees and varies from one person to another (see also phobia). If not properly handled, fear can lead to social problems. People who experience intense fear have been known to commit irrational and/or dangerous acts.

Some philosophers have considered fear to be a useless emotion; other thinkers note the usefulness of fear as a warning of potentially unpleasant consequences.

Degrees of fear
Fear can be described by different terms in accordance with its relative degrees. Fear covers a number of terms - terror, fright, paranoia, horror, persecution complex and dread.

Distrust
A mild stage of fear, more like caution than fear, usually focused on a person or object. Distrust is a lack of faith or belief, described as a feeling towards something questionable or unknown. For example, having distrust in a rickety old bridge across a 10,000ft drop.

Paranoia
Paranoia is a term used to describe a psychosis of fear, related to perception of being persecuted. This perception often causes one to change their normal behaviour in radical ways, after time their behavior may become extremely compulsive.

Terror
See also: terrorism

Terror refers to a pronounced state of fear, where someone becomes overwhelmed with a sense of immediate danger. Thus, terror overwhelms the person to the point of ill rational choices and non-typical behavior.

Facial
In fear, ones eyes widen and the upper lip rises. The brows draw together and the lips stretch horizontally. The speech is slurred and it takes longer to think through what one wants to say.

Cause of fear
See also: mass hysteria

The causes of fear can vary to a surprising degree; fear is to a certain extent a "cultural artifact" (Clifford Geertz). In 19th century Britain, one of the biggest fears was of dying poor, unmourned, unremembered, and possibly ending up on an anatomist's dissection table. By the early twentieth century, this had given way to a fear of being buried alive, to the extent that those who could afford it would make all sorts of arrangements to ensure this would be avoided (eg glass lids, for observation, and breathing pipes, for survival until rescued). During the Second World War, fear of death by bombing was much less than during World War I, even though many more bombs fell; air wardens would complain of civilians continuing to gossip on street corners instead of taking shelter. Similarly, when cars were new, fear of them was such that for a time the law required a man with a red flag to walk in front of it to warn the public; today, tens of thousands die in road accidents each year yet governments struggle to instill a real fear of drunk driving or speeding.

In 2005, University of Toronto researchers traced the origin of memories to the prefrontal cortex of the brain.