Feared
Fear is an emotional state which is aroused by threatening situations. The feeling of fear can be the direct result of certain kinds of sensory stimulation, such as sounds which resemble screaming. It can also result from the anticipation that undesirable events will possibly or certainly occur, which can motivate efforts to avoid or mitigate those events, or from imagining threats which are not actually present. While fear is typically felt to be a negative, unpleasant emotion, humans sometimes take pleasure in intentionally making themselves afraid. Fear is often a component of thrilling or adventurous experiences, and certain forms of popular media are based around evoking fear, such as horror films. Maladaptive levels of fear are closely associated with specific phobias and with internalizing psychopathologies like depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
The experience of fear involves a number of physiological changes, which in humans include more rapid breathing and heart rate, dilation of the pupils, spikes in cortisol levels, and elevated electrodermal activity. These qualities overlap considerably with the physiology of other negative, arousing emotions, such as anger, sadness, disgust, and anxiety. Fear also involves behavioural reactions like the startle response, the fight-or-flight response, and the freeze response. Like other emotions, the experience of fear is heavily affected by individual differences, situational factors, and cultural ways of thinking. For this reason, it can be unhelpful and inaccurate to assume that fear refers to a single, discrete, unified phenomenon.
Fear is often identified in both non-human vertebrates and invertebrates through physiological and behavioural observations, but the inability of non-human animals to communicate their experiences in language makes this identification challenging. Fear has often been associated with "lower" animals, hypothesized to arise from a more primitive part of the brain than advanced human cognitive capacities, but this view has no basis in contemporary neuroscience. Neural structures in vertebrate brains which are associated with emotional experiences are fully integrated into the dynamic, non-hierarchical cognitive systems by which animals, both human and non-human, address the complex situations in which they find themselves. Fear can therefore be understood as a facet of the mental life of animals, involved with cognition and with other related emotional states, which contributes to the ability to flexibly address complex, risky scenarios.
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