Fear From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the emotion. For other uses, see Fear (disambiguation). A scared child shows fear in an uncertain environment. Fear is an emotion induced by a threat perceived by living entities, which causes a change in brain and organ function and ultimately a change in behavior, such as running away, hiding or freezing from traumatic events. Fear may occur in response to a specific stimulus happening in the present, or to a future situation, which is perceived as risk to health or life, status, power, security, or in the case of humans wealth or anything held valuable. The fear response arises from the perception of danger leading to confrontation with or escape from/avoiding the threat (also known as the fight-or-flight response), which in extreme cases of fear (horror and terror) can be a freeze response or paralysis. In humans and animals, fear is modulated by the process of cognition and learning. Thus fear is judged as rational or appropriate and irrational or inappropriate. An irrational fear is called a phobia. Psychologists such as John B. Watson, Robert Plutchik, and Paul Ekman have suggested that there is only a small set of basic or innate emotions and that fear is one of them. This hypothesized set includes such emotions as joy, sadness, fright, dread, horror, panic, anxiety, acute stress reaction and anger. Fear should be distinguished from, but is closely related to, the emotion anxiety, which occurs as the result of threats which are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable Fear of death[edit] Death anxiety is multidimensional; it covers fears related to ones own death, the death of others, fear of the unknown after death, fear of obliteration, and fear of the dying process, which includes fear of a slow death and a painful death.[7] The Yale philosopher Shelly Kagan examined fear of death in a 2007 Yale open course [8] by examining the following questions: Is fear of death a reasonable appropriate response? What conditions are required and what are appropriate conditions for feeling fear of death? What is meant by fear, and how much fear is appropriate? According to Kagan for fear in general to make sense, three conditions should be met: the object of fear needs to be something bad, there needs to be a non-negligible chance of the bad state of affairs to happen, and there needs to be some uncertainty about the bad state of affairs. The amount of fear should be appropriate to the size of the bad. If the 3 conditions arent met, fear is an inappropriate emotion. He argues, that death does not meet the first two criteria, even if death is a deprivation of good things and even if one believes in a painful afterlife. Because death is certain, it also does not meet the third criteria, but he grants that the unpredictability of when one dies may be cause to a sense of fear
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 19:44:22 +0000
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