The Psychology of Fear

by Professor Robert Donovan

Presented at the Perth Day of Ideas, Saturday 2nd August 2003

One of the fears that people suffer from is a fear of public speaking and that's one of the fears that I have. I remember the very first time I went to a professional conference and I thought of a question that would have changed the course of mankind had I been brave enough to ask, I'm sure. But I sat there and thought everybody around me must have been deafened by the pounding of my chest - and that's one of our symptoms of fear. It's thought that a fear of public speaking comes from an evolutionary perspective in the sense that thousands of years ago you didn't really want to stand out in a crowd and make the wrong decision. It could lead to a limb being cut off.

From the level that we've been talking, the national levels of fear, I want to come down to talk about individual levels as well because it's really at an individual level that we feel the fear that maybe affects us as a nation. Much of what we hear about fear is that darker side and I will cover that too. We can be paralyzed by fear but we also talk about courage. Someone once said if a diver always thought of the shark he would never lay hands on the pearl. That is, we must overcome our fears to seek out what's really good in life. On the other hand de Becker, a security consultant for the stars and the government, calls it The Gift of Fear and in fact he's closer to the truth there because it's fear that enables us to survive as a species. It allows us to recognize threats and take steps to prevent them and this comes from the fear of the pain that usually accompanies a threat.

There's an old saying that 'a good scare is worth more than good advice' and we certainly see that in the health field all the time, particularly with men who are reluctant to seek help for things. It was Richard Nixon who said people respond not to love but to fear and certainly the Nixon White House was one of the precursors of politicians running on fear. But fear is the quintessential human emotion as described by DeLozier. No other animal experiences fear like we do, nor the range of fears that we do. That's probably because we are an unspecified species, very, very vulnerable to predators, climate changes and all sorts of diseases. In fact DeLozier said we shouldn't be called homo sapiens we should be called fearful man. We have an extreme fear of self, of course, to protect ourselves but also through consciousness we have a fear for others − the people that we love, our families and so on − and this leads us to not only exploitation by politicians but marketers of all sorts, and of course in the public health area we hammer you with fears everyday about the sugar and the fat in your diet and the lack of exercise that you do and so on. I suspect that the rise in depression around the world probably coincides with the increase in public health education campaigns that have been mounted.

It's also our conscious that leads us to fear for our possessions, our jobs, our homes, our photo albums, all those sorts of things; and a fear for the future and whether we're going to pass this exam, get a promotion in our jobs, what's going to happen with our children's future and all of these sorts of things ' and as we get older, worrying about being less in control, loss of independence and so on, and a general fear of the unknown. As in this cartoon, 'What if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about?'. He may be right. If you talk to some of my friends who have recently retired, they think the hokey pokey should have been what it was all about right from the start.

Fear is what occurs as the response you feel to an immediate external threat. We tend to refer to anxieties as the emotions and feelings you get with respect to potential threats. It's all of these ruminations with tomorrow's events that are the bane of our lives. Robert M. Sapolsky wrote a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and it's quite true, my dog doesn't lie down at night wondering whether tomorrow's breakfast is going to be as good as the last one or whether he'll get a walk or not but we do, we worry continually about things. The other element about that title of 'why Zebras don't get ulcers' is that stress, fear, anxiety and so on do have tremendous physical as well as psychological effects on our systems and that's why it so crucial.

So, it's claimed that fear can bring out the best in us, for example in driving all the medical research that we do. DeLozier says we fear so much therefore we have so much to learn, and this drives a lot of scientific research, water and safety research, medical research, and tremendous advances into understanding the immune system following the advent of AIDS and the fear of AIDS. But fear also brings out the worst in us: the arms race, ethnic cleansing and so on and the question is why?

Perhaps the answer lies deep within the primitive brain ' in the amygdala − that is one of the core elements of what is called the limbic system which is responsible for our emotions. Now as we evolved from the top of the spinal cord we've simply lumped different stages of development together, so we had a brain stem and then the cerebellum and then the midbrain, and then the cortex − all the grey matter at the top where we do all our thinking. Unfortunately over the tens of thousands of years that we've developed we've actually kept the old structures very much operating in the same ways as they operate in animals so the sorts of fears and fight and fight responses that occur in animals is our first operating system today. What happens in the limbic system is that all the incoming sensory information we get − sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and so on − is all elaborated and scanned for threats. Some of these are innate. Loud noise is one of these that will start an automatic response. The limbic system has rich connections to the cortex where we can think about it, and so it's also connected to all of the systems that control our heart beat, our perspiration rates, the dilation of our eyes, all of those bodily functions. What's happening is we are continually scanning the environment as information is coming in from all sorts of sources. What our limbic system does is automatically assign a good or a bad tag to what's coming in and it's an automatic emotional response to whatever that is. You can see the scanning system in operation when you're at a party and all you hear is a background mumble, mumble ... then you hear your name and as soon as you hear those words, your ears prick up and you turn around to hear what's being said. In short, there's something in us that is actually scanning at a pre-conscious level. The point about this initial analysis is that it acts very quickly so that you're walking along and you see a snake and you take a leap forward in the air as I have done. And then you look back − it wasn't a snake it was stick. What you've done is you've made a very quick judgement on incomplete information. However the primitive system worked very well because it allows for lots of those false positives because it's better to think that it is a snake and get out of the way than to say well it may be a snake and I'll tread on it, see! So, our primitive system acts as an alarm bell. It makes very quick, good/bad categorizations. That is on the basis of the 'them and us' classifications we make. One of the biologically based fears we have is of strangers, which was very adaptive years ago to know who was your mob and who was their mob because in fact there was clear conflict.

Overall, we're over-sensitive to threats, better to be sure than sorry - and basically we make good vs evil classifications about a whole range of things. We do have consciousness on top of that, which is supposed to give us the ability to control the primitive systems but that doesn't always work so well.

What consciousness does give us though is this additional fear of mental pain. We have a fear of physical pain, common virtually to all species, but we have also a fear of mental pain, a fear of rejection, fear of embarrassment and fear of shame. Of the examples where the primitive system overrules conscious processing is with air travel. We know rationally that air travel is very safe relative to car travel. There is one airline pilot who allegedly says as they land, 'Thank you for flying with us folks. The most dangerous part of your journey is about to begin.' However, we are far more afraid of flying than driving. Part of that is because we can empathize about the 'helpless terror' that passengers must experience as their plane heads for several minutes sometimes down to the ground.

What consciousness does give us is the ability to establish empathy and it's the establishment of empathy that allows us to carry on in an humane way. But it doesn't guarantee empathy as this cartoon shows. I'll talk later about an example where that lack of empathy leads to tragedy.

Consciousness also allows the creation of unwarranted fears, social fears, anxiety disorders and paranoia, and phobias including xenophobia, homophobia and so on.

A couple of characteristics of fears are sensitization and habituation. Sensitization occurs when one threat heightens your sensitivity to following threats. This can have devastating effects such as the trigger happy cops in New York who fired first and asked questions later and it turns out to be a wallet that the person was pulling out of their pocket ' not a gun. I lived in New York for a while before Rudy Giuliani cleaned it up a lot and it was quite a frightening place to be. I didn't realize how much until I came over at Christmas time and I was playing pool in a hotel on Christmas Eve. It was a semi-dark sort of pool room at the back of this hotel and somebody walked towards me and my immediate reaction was to turn the cue around to the big end ready to strike back and then realized that this person just wanted to borrow the chalk. Similarly back in New York one day a big truck pulled across me, clearly in the wrong and pulled my front bumper off. This was very scary and because it was unjust and unfair my initial fear response turned into anger. However my consciousness calculated that the ratio of the size of his truck to my car was approximately the same ratio of his size to mine and so my consciousness suggested that I apologize profusely for getting in his way and thanking him warmly for removing the unsightly bumper on my Ford Pinto. So I did.

Habituation refers to continual threats and fears and stresses so that you simply get used to it. People got used to the bombings in London during the war. Palestinians in the refugee camps get used to continual incursions by the Israeli Army. It's said that maybe our fascination for horror films (a fondness for fabricated fear) is actually a way of habituating to our fear of death. The fear of death is our greatest fear − probably because it includes fear of the unknown, fear of pain and fear of helplessness at the time of death.

Fear can also be pleasurable. An interesting quote from Winston Churchill is, 'nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result'. We do get stories back from some soldiers after a battle that the rush of adrenaline and later release is euphoric. Similarly, burglars will talk about the fear and the thrill, the sheer thrill of it afterwards. So we do have this desire, like bungee jumping and other extreme sports, to increase the level of our fear. The essential difference of course is that we have control and if you have control then you have far more control over the fears as distinct from some disadvantaged people who don't.

The darker side of fear: 'Hopelessness is the enemy of happiness and the ally of fear', and that fear feeds on helplessness, and helplessness feeds on fear. Fear and stereotyping feeds prejudice − and intolerance can lead to hate. Insecurity and fear yield vulnerability. Vulnerability and fear and helplessness, depression, a lack of control, despair and loss of future, can result in suicide. And we see this in indigenous youth particularly in Australia; we see it in Palestinian suicide bombers. We also see it in David Kelly under pressure from the government and the BBC. He didn't know the rules; he didn't even know he was playing a game; and even if he did know the game and rules, he didn't have the skills and the resources and I suspect he assumed his future was shot to bits, literally and he took his own life. I think the more disturbing story was on the 7:30 Report recently. Eleanor Tibble, a 15 year-old Air Force Cadet in Tasmania suicided when she thought she was going to be discharged from the Cadets, which was her sense of self. Her whole goal in life was to be a cadet, following her grandfather's career in the Air Force. Following an incident with her instructor (not of the cadet's making), the Wing Commander decided that she should be dishonorably discharged if she did not resign. The word came down from senior officers that she should not be dishonorably discharged; she should be allowed to remain a cadet. However, the Wing Commander kept that information to himself for whatever reason − I suspect fear of embarrassment, fear of loss of face whatever it might be, but on that 15^th day, Eleanor Tibble suicided. Had the Wing Commander informed the cadet when he received the information, Eleanor Tibble would likely be alive today.

I think that is part of the problem where large organizations simply delay things hoping that people's legitimate complaints will simply go away because people get worn down by the terrible strains of continual stress when fighting large organisations.

That leads me to climates of fear: fear in families. Violence is one of the major causes of dysfunction, psychological and physical problems in women and in children. It's no co-incidence that our domestic violence prevention program is called Freedom from Fear. It's the fear that's dysfunctional. In a recent survey we found that fifteen per cent of 18-40 year old males said that they had deliberately used fear to influence their partner.

At the organizational level, fear of job loss is widespread ' and we know job insecurity is related to heart disease. Fears in the work force of making mistakes lead to non-productivity and all sorts of things.

We might expect that some enlightened organizations would be free of fear ' or at least there would be less of it. However, recently acting on behalf of a student, I contacted a department in one of our universities and was given some information. However, the informant requested that I not tell her head of department that she had given me that information. I found out later that the student was not only entitled to this information, but the department in fact was obligated to give that information. It's clearly an unhealthy state of affairs in any organization where somebody feels afraid to do their job.

At the community or neighborhood level we get the fear of crime, certainly on our transport systems, fear of the young, graffiti, and so on. Of course much of this attracts away from the real things we should be in fear of in society.

I'll skip through to exploiting fear for political ends, September 11^th and sensitization. What September 11^th apparently did was sensitize us to threats that perhaps we never even thought of before, far more so than the Oklahoma bombing did because September 11^th was done by strangers, in fact by Arabs who already constituted a negative frame. If I could just go back to the Oklahoma bombing, if you look at Timothy McVeigh's response when questioned about the impact on kids in the day care centre, where twenty or so kids were killed. He said they were simply 'collateral damage' in his war against the state ' and we know where he got the words collateral damage from.

But September 11^th also sensitized us here in Australia because a number of Australians in New York were killed and a lot of Australians reported on the event, and we watched it time and time again on television. I was driving along the freeway after that and I saw a small plane heading towards the city centre and all those feelings of apprehension occurred that there was a plane going into one of the buildings.

What it sensitized us to here in Australia was 'stranger danger' and particularly then to refugees. No doubt some of these people could be terrorists already or potential terrorists as claimed in the media. But for complex issues in particular, creating uncertainty about the status of these people simply amplified anxieties.

The solution was simple: exploit the primitive classification system which was already at work for a large proportion of Australians. So Howard didn't create all these xenophobic fears, he simply used them when they were there. So you label refugees as 'illegals', 'queue jumpers'. The complexity is removed, they're clearly the 'bad guys', the anxiety is removed by strong government action - and then we do some stigmatizing, dehumanizing: they throw their children overboard! They're not just strangers, they're really very strange. So they're clearly to be feared amongst our midst. It's interesting that cult leaders work in exactly the same way; what they do is promise to remove the uncertainty of life and the fear of the unknown. And of course, use of those dehumanizing tactics is how we absolve moral responsibility and perpetrate hate movements. We dehumanize the object as Hitler did with the Jews. A number of Hitler's propaganda symbols actually depicted Jews as cockroaches and rats to play even more directly on the primitive systems.

I'll end actually by saying that Western governments went through a period around the 1980s of being driven by public opinion research, finding out what the public thinks and moving policies along that way. The focus now though is on spin research, how governments can frame announcements so that the public accepts what the government has already decided. I guess this approach is epitomized in Tony Blair's New Labour Government. You may remember Blair's use of the term 'appeasers' when they went to Afghanistan - which in the United Kingdom of course is an extremely pejorative term because it has connotations of Nazi appeaser from the Second World War. So it's really a big insult and what you're doing is making people afraid to speak out about these things. I guess the moral bankruptcy with the fear-based approach and an expression of total callous indifference to individual suffering was evident in the ministerial advisor in the UK government − whom I'm ashamed to say was an Australian − in the immediate aftermath of September 11^th. Even as the World Trade Centre was coming down and thousands were dying, this adviser sent an email around to all the government departments saying that if you've got any bad news to get out, this was a good time. So perhaps in the debacle it is Iraq today, and in the aftermath of Dr. Kelly's unfortunate and unnecessary death, Mr Blair, Mr Howard and Mr Bush might in fact reflect on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's claim that in politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

On that gloomy note I leave you to the rest and I shall return at the end of the day with hopefully something happier to say.