The Beginnings of a New Theory of Fear
I’m constantly astonished at how little we truly understand very basic aspects of human nature. Fear is one of them.
You might imagine we have a pretty good grasp on fear. If you search “fear” on Google Scholar, nearly 5 million results pop up. Thousands of researchers and philosophers have looked into the phenomena of fear over the centuries.
But do we truly know what fear is?
One of my favorite academic papers on fear is a moderated discussion on approaches to defining and investigating fear. In it, leading fear researcher Dean Mobbs interviews several top researchers who have spent their careers investigating fear. It includes viewpoints from neuroscience, animal behavior, cognitive science, and more.
The one thing that is immediately clear is that each of these researchers, despite having made major contributions on fear in their respective fields, have quite different ideas of what fear is and how we can conduct research to understand it.
Here are some of their comments on defining fear:
Fear can only be defined based on observation of behavior in a natural environment, not neuroscience. In my view, fear is a psychological state with specific functional properties, conceptually distinct from conscious experience; it is a latent variable that provides a causal explanation of observed fear-related behaviors.
Fear is a neural–behavior system that evolved to protect animals against environmental threats to what John Garcia called the external milieu (as opposed to the internal milieu), with predation being the principal driving force behind that evolution (for example, as opposed to a toxin).
I hypothesize that every mental event, fear or otherwise, is constructed in an animal’s brain as a plan for assembling motor actions and the visceromotor actions that support them, as well as the expected sensory consequences of those actions. The function most frequently associated with fear is protection from threat. The corresponding definition of fear is an instance an animal’s brain constructs defensive actions for survival.
Fear… is a conscious awareness that you are in harm’s way. Activation of subcortical circuits controlling behavioral and physiological responses that occur at the same time can intensify the experience by providing inputs to the cognitive circuits, but they do not determine the content of the experience. The experience itself, in my model, is the result of pattern completion of one’s personal fear schema, which gives rise to some variant of what you have come to know as one of the many varieties subsumed under the concept of ‘fear’ that you have built up by accumulating experiences over the course of your life.
‘Fear’ is the combination of defensive responses—physiological, behavioral and (perhaps in the case of humans) the conscious experience and interpretations of these responses—that are stimulated by specific stimuli.
Fear is an intensely negative internal state. It conducts orchestration of coordinated functions serving to arouse our peak performance for avoidance, escape or confrontation.
Some of these researchers distinguish the conscious experience of fear from defensive behaviors, while others argue that fear is best understood as the amalgamation of behaviors and states associated with threat avoidance. In some cases threat is implied, and in others it’s directly stated. However, “threat” is never really defined.
So, is fear defined by defensive behaviors, a conscious experience, or both? Is it the outcome of a response, or is it the response itself? And if it is a response to threat (or the outcome of responses to threat), then what exactly is a “threat”?
My theory of fear comes from my perspective as a horror researcher. As a behavioral biologist trying to understand what makes scary stories “work” and what defines horror media, I have developed a theory of fear that is strongly influenced by researchers like LeDoux and Mobbs, but deviates in some important ways.
As an evolutionary scientist, my theory of fear also sits mostly at the computational level (a la Marr’s levels of analysis). In other words, I am interested in explaining what task or function fear is serving a biological creature.
I also am somewhat interested in the algorithmic level: the rules needed to achieve that function.
However, my theory leaves open the implementational level of explanation. That is to say, I am less interested in explaining the physical instantiation of fear (specific neural circuits, brain regions, etc.).
This is still very much a work in progress, so I welcome feedback. And as promised, my paid subscribers are some of the first to see my new ideas. I haven’t yet presented this elsewhere.
The model below is influenced heavily by Joseph LeDoux’s work on fear, as well as Paul Cisek’s approach to affordances. The idea also grew out of a paper I recently published with Edgar DuBourg, which I have written about before on my Substack. Bringing it full circle, that paper grew out of a Substack post I wrote. So, maybe this one will inspire an academic paper as well.
