![]() ![]() Instead, fear, like chairs, might be a psychologically constructed category (this of course ultimately makes it no less biological). 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”. 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. 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). Fear is what links sets of stimuli to patterns of behaviors. Fear in turn is caused by particular sets of stimuli (in a context-dependent way). 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). 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. It is not identified with the conscious feeling of being afraid, nor with fear behaviors such as screaming and running away. First and foremost, it is a functional definition: fear is a central state of an organism ( Box 1). Several features of such a concept of “fear” are important to stress. ![]() ![]() It could be linked to variation in genotype, at least in part, making it a candidate for an endophenotype. 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. Its usefulness is explanatory, and one can be agnostic about any correspondence with other psychological, let alone neurobiological, states. The approach I advocate is pragmatic: fear is an intervening variable between sets of context-dependent stimuli and suites of behavioral response. 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.Īt the outset, we need an operational definition of “fear”. 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. A flurry of neurobiological data has come from two technical developments: fMRI (applied to humans) and optogenetics (applied to mice). Much of this fragmentation, and much of the excitement, comes from the highly interdisciplinary nature of how fear is being investigated. 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. Laypeople have no difficulty using the word “fear” in everyday conversation, yet are quickly stumped by questions such as these. 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? ![]()
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