On the concepts of fear.

Abstract

Historical changes in the meaning of a word are common in ordinary conversation as well as in the technical prose of scientific communities. It is not surprising, therefore, that both the sense and the referential meanings of the English words that name emotions have undergone serious transformations. John Bunyan, for example, understood fear to be an adaptive feeling because it ensured civil behavior and permitted one to love the Deity. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists, in agreement with the larger community, regard fear as maladaptive because it restricts freedom of action. The focus on adaptiveness as a primary criterion for classifying an emotion is in accord with the pragmatists’ preference for emphasizing the functional consequences of emotional states. Peircel and James’ argued that the most useful definition of a term was a listing of its functions. However, the human mind is also attracted to the notion that each object, or state, possesses a set of inherent qualities. This latter, analytic perspective defines a tree by its shape, physiology, and chemical composition rather than by the facts that it offers shade from the sun and can be used to build bookcases. Most students of emotion write about these phenomena as if they were distinct psychological-cum-physiological states knowable through measurements of brain activity, neurochemistry, peripheral physiological responses, self-reports, facial expressions, and overt behavior^.^-^ Some assume, in addition, that there is a universal set of primary emotions, each defined by a profile of objective features, as is true for the basal ganglia and for birds.“