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Chapter 1 The Brain's Fear System
Fear Is Normal
Fear is a normal part of psychological development for infants and children and critical to our survival across the lifespan. At every developmental stage, conquering fear allows children to grow, take risks, be adventurous, remain open to possibilities, and stay curious. Traversing through life is dependent upon the brain identifying patterns of familiar associations that may signal a dangerous outcome versus safety, and the ability to update those associations as our circumstances change. Fear is the associated learning of memories and the emotional and internal response generated by them. As we grow and develop throughout our lives, fear learning (distinguishing between what's safe and/or dangerous) and the ability to overcome or adapt to fear (fear extinction) by diminishing, reversing, or cognitively controlling fear as our circumstances change, is important to our survival, growth, and learning.
Infants learn early from their caregivers the necessary cues of who may be a threat and who is safe and who needs to be kept around. Infants learn early how to recognize and remember their caregiver by how they are touched, what they hear, smell, and can see (Debiec and Sullivan 2017). The quality and characteristics of those interactions shape infant behavior and physiologic response early on. Psychologist John Bowlby theorized that an attachment relationship to at least one primary caregiver is the most important aspect of social and emotional learning for a child. Attachment learning begins at birth and so does the learning of fear.
Caregivers can trigger a fear response in infants and children through social referencing. Social referencing refers to how a child uses caregiver cues to evaluate certain situations, like when a stranger comes close. Studies show that infants are very sensitive to a caregiver's emotional state, including fear and anxiety and readily pick up on it. From birth, we are primed to both attach for safety to our caregivers, learn about fear from them, and practice behavior that promotes our survival. Students utilize the same cues from teachers.
As children get older, what they fear may change. While younger children might fear the dark or scary monsters, older kids will shift to current events, like Covid-19, car accidents, or a family member being hurt. Our kids are always paying attention to what we discuss as adults and they sense what we are afraid of. Too much unmonitored time watching the news or being on social media without the context of feeling safe by having a discussion with their parents or teachers may increase children's fears by contributing to uncertainty and feeling unprotected.
Children will process fear depending on their age, the intensity and duration of exposure to a threat or image, and context. As adults do, children will use a variety of coping behaviors when dealing with a fearful event. Children may want to cuddle more or be clingy, try to take control of the situation by asking questions to understand, or cry and disengage. They reach for reassurance or safety by turning to a familiar face or favorite stuffed animal – all normal responses.
Although fear has been described by some researchers as a “childish emotion” that must be repressed in order to be considered mature, fear is not an emotion: it's a sensory and an evolutionary response that generates emotions. Fear is a brain and body phenomenon that connects our internal and external experiences to keep us safe. When a mother scares her child by screaming at him to not run out into traffic, the combination of being startled by her voice and actions will generate a fear memory (utilizing his senses, inner feelings, and being startled) that will be retained and direct him to look both ways when crossing the street. Now jump back thousands of years, and replace “traffic” with a hungry lion, and fear response begins to make a lot of sense.
Fear Keeps Us Alive
Avoiding being eaten by predators is an early evolutionary task of animals and humans. Basic survival is one of the most cogent demands in the ecosystem. The neurophysiology of both our body and brain for survival has been engineered and adapted over time for one reason … staying alive. Charles Darwin, a biologist and geologist known for his writings about our human struggle for existence through natural selection, said, “Organisms unable to adapt to the demands of their environment will fail to pass on their genes and fall as casualties in the ‘war on nature’” (Darwin 1871).
Human beings are tasked with being smarter than their predators while managing the demands of eating, sleeping, procreating, and avoiding being resource depleted. Lines are drawn as we constantly monitor whether we can safely eat, live, and sleep. Imagine your brain on a Zoom conference call that never stops: there's cross talk and background noise, distractions abound, feelings arise – anxiety, excitement, boredom, anger, frustration – you want to exit, but your brain never hits “leave the meeting.” Our brain has the ability to uniquely focus, allowing us to respond to different environments, and circumstances whether they are non-threatening or life-endangering, 24/7.
Fear can result from the presence of a real threat that may be in your face or miles away. The level of danger that you feel is anchored in how close it is and how great the potential is for it to get closer. If you have had the experience of listening to weather forecasts that start as a threat, advance to a warning, and leap to blaring sirens instructing you to take immediate cover, then chances are you have experienced the physiological symptoms of fear: increased heart rate, rapid breathing, sweaty hands, and a sinking feeling in your gut. At the same time, your brain is processing the depth of danger and sending biochemical messages throughout your body.
In that same situation of an ominous weather forecast, anxiety may present when you hear the initial forecast, and will depend on both your experience with bad storms, or watching others' bad experiences with storms, or simply having a personality that worries about natural disasters. Anxiety can occur with remote, unusual, or abstract triggers that usually aren't related to a direct threat. Anxiety can occur in conditions that are safe, but lead to what if thoughts triggering brain and body unrest.
Both anxiety and fear can lead to avoidance behavior, and involve emotions that can invade our sense of well-being. It's important to understand that even with fear and anxiety we have time to think, assess the threat, determine if we need to run or fight or relax and stay put. The key point here is when you feel fearful, notice your anxiety … take a breath. When our brain perceives a threat, it actively will work for our safety and survival.
To survive, animals and humans must know how to recognize and respond to a threat. Our preferred state is to be in a safe, secure place. When we are chilled and stress free, we are in balance and can focus on finding food, relaxing with friends or family, engaging in romantic pursuits, and teaching or learning with a clear head. If the risk of a threat appears, is felt but not detectable and there is no obvious danger yet, we may be wary but are still good. In the presence of a detectable threat or predator, all systems are “go” and either we freeze, run away, or fight. As presumed prey, our singular goal is to escape and fight only if we have to; the predator's goal is to capture and consume.
When there is a smell, sound, glance, taste, or perception of danger, our brain adapts to multi-sensory mode. Fear is not produced from only one brain region but is a network of brain structures that coordinate responses (see Appendix A). The amygdala, an almond shaped structure located in the temporal lobe is one of those. The amygdala is a part of the brain's ancient neural circuits and part of the limbic system and receives inputs from our senses. The limbic system supports emotion, behavior, long-term memory, and input from our senses. It influences how we respond to stress and the stress response by its interaction with other brain systems like the endocrine system and autonomic nervous system. The amygdala plays a role in fear expression, fear learning, and fear extinction. Emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses to fear are all mediated by the amygdala (Gozzi et al. 2010). The amygdala
