Abstract
Fear is defined as a behavioral–cognitive–emotional system that serves rapidly to prepare animals for threats and dangers. The emotion or feeling of fear is only one aspect of this system; it is a by-product of a coordinated pattern of brain activities and bodily changes that appear in response to threatening stimuli. Traditionally, psychologists of very different theoretical persuasions have proposed a variety of psychological mechanisms by which emotions such as fear may operate. More recently, however, the psychological and neural underpinnings of fear have been investigated empirically through the study of nonhuman animals. Studies employing various experimental techniques in diverse species of animals have identified the amygdala, a cluster of nuclei located in the temporal lobes of the brain, as a critical site for the generation of innate as well as acquired fear responses. A widely used preparation for the study of acquired fear in animals (and one in which the amygdala is heavily implicated) is classical fear conditioning. This paradigm may serve as a model system for the study of pathological fear in humans.
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