Human Emotion: the Truth About Fear

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All of us, young or old, male or female has at times been confronted with situations that evoke sensations of fear. Whether the source is a self-inflicted scary movie, a narrowly escaped auto-accident, or the feeling of impending doom that comes from a walk down a dark and lonely street, we all share, as part of the human condition, the ability to experience fear. Fear is defined as an emotional state in the presence or anticipation of a dangerous or noxious stimulus, and is usually characterized by an internal, subjective experience of extreme agitation, a desire to flee or to attack and by a variety of sympathetic reactions. There are several ways of acquiring fear, and any theorists have done research about the possible origins of fear, resulting in great debate concerning whether fear is solely a product of nature or a product of social learning. However, like all emotions, fear is a mixture of both innate biological functions, and learned cognitive associations. Evolution has acted so that genes and environment act to complement each other in yielding behavioral solutions to the survival challenges faced by animals. Innate, or instinctive, fear responses allow animals to benefit from generations of natural selection on behavior. Along with innate predisposition to fear, social and cognitive learning gives humans tools to respond to local conditions and changing environments. In the 1970s, researchers Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen and Carroll Izard became interested in whether emotions differ across cultures, and as part of an experiment they showed photographs of emotional expressions to people around the world to determine if a smile means the same thing to someone in San Francisco as it does a person from Samoa. They found that everyone recognized an upturned mouth as the universal sign of happiness, and there was similar agreement about expressions of

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