About fear and behaviorism

Fear. Yes, what is it? Really? We have to get back in history to describe it, right? In old english, the word is put out to be of a meaning saying “calamity and/or disaster”. In other words, in our mental images of fear, was not intended to be an emotion. It has its roots of prehistoric common german, which word was “feraz”, which means, yes, you’re on it! Danger. The Old Saxons and the Old High Germans “far”, which means “ambush and/or danger”. Old Icelandic also have “far” in their odies for oldies dictionary. They say it means “treachery and/or damage”.

Two out of four, fear must be associated with danger. I’d rather not say disaster or damage. Causing it through fear will be completely different things. If you look at the Old English way of saying the word, they say it’s related to the verb “færan”, which they meant was “to terrify and/or take by surprise”. If so they say, in the Middle English, the word “fear” is firstly presented with a sense, a sense of emotion of fear. That’s about them fear-i-o’s. You live with them and they crank the sirens by living inside of you. You have great bed time stories with your fear, laying side by side by and inside you. O’rly the Owl?

As said before, fear is most certenitly a survival mechanism. A reflex which run through our nervous systems. And by that, it reacts when you throw a response to a negative stimulus. And to understand the different phrases of the lovely word stimulus, you have to understand a bit of behavioral learning theory. So I’d say, fear is, really, a man’s best friend. The old cliché with them dogs being a man’s best friend, can find itself a bed and go to sleep like the way Cinderella did. She had no fear, did she? Did she really?

Okay, back to basic. What is the origin of fear coming from, really? Did it just pop up out of nowhere from a bad dream? Fine, we all know where the word come from, but what about the relatives of it? The biological thingy? We don’t like biology, it is teh shitz. So we do have to get through the unconscious, lovely subcortical origin of fear of our beloved humans. The abstract way of saying it, is that fear is coming from negative stimulus. And when fear stimuli is coming through, it activates from the amygdala. Amygdala lives in your brain, looking like an almond. It will send lovely impulses to our beloved hypothalamus. Hypothalamus is a link that works through our nervous system, and goes on to the enocrine system, again through hypophysis. Hypothalamus is having a good time below thalamus, and thalamus is located above the brain stem. So, hypothalamus plays a big part playing with our nervous system, and is the high centre for the autonome nervous system and the enocrine system. These parts are linkies through each other, and in that lovely, colourful, slimey centre, they will control our blood pressure, brain rythm, hypophysis, temperature regulations and stomach and the and the reproductive tract. That’s a funny connection when you throw in some fear.

Anyway, back to fear and amygdala(e). It is a central word to activate fear. It happens with a itty, bitty low level of visual processing. It is, however, mediated by a bit of subcorical pathway. Studies and data from other patients in the primary visual cortex, is showing that the amygdalae will and can be activated in the lovely absence of a bit of naughty cortical processing. Visual stimuli will, and can access, the amygdalae through a pathway including superior collicus and pulvinar nucleus of thalamus. And I agree, it is an evolutionary argument. Even though it is abstract, with many theories around it. We never know.

But, what activates it? What is it? We can go on and on, different fears, different likenings. Fear, as stated, come along in different shapes and forms. We can induce unwanted fear and aversion by introducing an object, or using aversives. From that, we have to keep in mind that conditioning and repeating, will give a repetitive behavior system. Look at Watson, a true Pavlovian keeping his mind on his ideas. He was, like many psychologists, involved in animal research, but later on he was busy studying the human behavior. He thought that us humans were born with few reflexes, but the emotional reactions of love and rage had a big game in it. He later states that all other behaviors we set our selves into, is established through (yeah, that’s the word again!) stimulus responses associated through conditioning (associative learning, and our man is Ivan Pavlov, and goes on with conditioned stimulus and unconditioned response. Repeat them in pairs, CS and UR will be associated and the tested organism will start to produce a behavioral response to CS only. When this behavior occured, he Pavlov decided to call the given behavior a conditioned response). Ok, enough Pavlov (a great russian indeed!).

A new line drawed, and we shall continue with our lovely, human testing man, Watson. He had an experiment with a young boy named Albert (oh, no, not Einstein), and with him, he had a white lab rat. Albert didn’t mind the rat at all, and had no fear of it. But whenever Albert decided to touch the rat, Watson made a loud sound. Albert didn’t like that sound, and activated amygdalae. Albert didn’t associate the rat with something bad, but Albert was fightened by the noise Watson made. Then Albert was conditioned to the fear he had because of Watson’s loud noise, and Albert avoided the rat because of that. Later, that fear, was for Albert, generalized to other small animals, to be specific, rodents. But Watson did some more tests, and decided to extinguish Alberts fear for small animals by presenting the lab rat again, now, without the loud noise he presented when Albert touched the rat the first time. That study showed that this conditioned fear Albert had, was more powerful, and it was permanent. But this study shows us that the role of conditioning in developing emotional response to a certain stimuli, does work. Specific fear, phobias and even prejudices people develop over time, may have something to do with it.

But, is that all? We have another lovely man who I can call the man of behaviorism. B.F. Skinner (so, you are think the black box with his daughter already? You’re not alone. Interesting, though. That man was the God of psychology). I recommend his book “Science and Human Behavior”, by the way. So, he goes on with studying animals. He put it on the edge saying and teaching the animals in these tests, that they don’t have emotions or intelligens. The only thing they had, was behavior, and behavior alone. You shape behavior by rewards, positive and negative reinforcements and punishment through the environment. Something good happens, and then something bad happens. Take the consequenses of it. We all agree that punishment is bad, but negative reinforcement is good. If you produce and introduce punishment when something bad happens. But negative reinforcement is when something bad will stop happening, or won’t start happening in the first place, because of something you did. Negative reinforcement is positive through your way of taking something at you. Your kid is crying. You yell or cuddle or whatever to make him or her stop, and he or she stop crying. That is something positive occuring to you as positive. Repeat that behavior next time, and kid won’t cry. Or your kid is taking his or hers skateboard down the road, you said no, and take it away from him or her. Next time, he or she will most likely don’t take his or hers skateboard down the street again. If so, repeat. Positive for you, and positive for your kid getting that skateboard back. I like that variable ratio schedule of saying that the number of, well, correct repetitions for taking back the correct response for reinforcement varies. That’s why clicker training is a good doing for shaping a wanted behavior. Punishment given to a bad behaviour won’t be as effective as when rewarding a good behavior when working with an animal showing (not even that) what you want him to do. That ain’t rock science. Punishment will create fear in the long run either way. Animals are stimulus responsive machines. That’s just how it work. Our brain is powerful, and some people learn it the hard way (let’s take Skinners stroke, for an example, read it up).

So, I have no conclusion of the individual fear occuring. That’s what we are, individuals. What’s causing the different fears (or even phobias) in manhood, is still a difficult question to answer. So, what is fear, really? A lot of ethology and biological crap? Or something just existing in the air your breath? Them wonders, them wonders.

Fear out.