Research Reveals Clues to Phobia Creation

Scientists experimenting with images of tarantulas have concluded that the human brain responds differently to threats based on proximity, direction and how scary people expect something to be. While those conclusions are totally obvious, the recent experiments are revealing specifically what parts of the brain are involved in identifying and magnifying human fear.

Researchers in Cambridge, England used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track brain activity in 20 volunteers as they watched a tarantula placed near their feet.

"We've shown that it's not just a single structure in the brain, it's a number of different parts of the fear network and they are working together to orchestrate the fear response,” Dean Mobbs, who led the study, tells Reuters News. "It seems that when a spider moves closer to you, you see a switch from the anxiety regions of the brain to the panic regions." 

Volunteers were actually watching an elaborately rigged video of a tarantula which they believed was near their foot, since getting the spider to do the same thing for each volunteer would have been impossible.

The scientists also asked volunteers beforehand how scared they thought they might be of the tarantula. They found that those who thought they would be most scared had a false impression afterwards of how large the spider was. This so-called "expectation error" could be the key to people developing a phobia ~ an irrational, intense and persistent fear of certain things, people, animals or situations.

"This may be one cognitive mechanism by which people acquire phobias," said Mobbs.

Click here for the complete Reuters article.

Click here for a Business Week article on the topic.

Transforming Fear

Picasso's 1937 painting, Guernica.

Robert Sardello calls himself a spiritual psychologist and his beliefs are rooting in the thinking of both Austrian philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner and Swiss psychological sage Carl Jung. There’s something about Sardello’s writing that awakens parts of my soul. When I read him ~ I’m now in my third Sardello book ~ it’s as if a deep-toned gong is being struck, sending out reverberations of truth.

I would not classify his 1999 book Freeing the Soul From Fear as your standard self-help book. His discussion of personal fear goes well beyond the familiar descriptions, and many of his observations of fear in today’s world are profound. Here’s a small sample:

Fear constitutes a much larger and more comprehensive presence than has yet been realized. Beginning in the nineteenth century, therapeutic psychology sought to identify the symptoms related to this phenomenon. The types of fear recognized included hysteria, behind which some trauma, real or imaged, was always to be found; shell shock or combat neurosis, now commonly called post-traumatic stress syndrome, which was first investigated after World War I; abuse and domestic violence; fear of natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, or fire; individual phobias such as panic attacks, anxieties, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. 

The reality of fear is far more wide-ranging, however. Working with victims of trauma does little to impede the larger presence of fear in the world. The goal is to become more conscious of what we are dealing with and to recognize that different fears require different capacity of soul to overcome them. The need is not to remove fear from the world, but instead to develop in ourselves the psychic capacity to confront its destructive power. In this realm, consciousness, coupled with love, is everything. Enlarging consciousness to include an awareness of soul allows a healthy struggle with fear, and love makes possible its transformation, not just within ourselves but also within the world.

I’ve not yet finished the book. His overall message, at this point, promises to be optimistic.

Brain Now Found to Better Distinguish Fear

New research into the brain’s capacity for storing fear holds promise for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome, among other fears that lurk in our minds and can haunt our lives.

The new study results appear in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience. According to PhysOrg.com:

The research focused on the brain's amygdala, which has previously been shown to store fear memories. However, prior studies have indicated that the amygdala does not discriminate among the different threats it holds and processes. In other words, whether you are afraid of dogs because you were once bitten by a dog or you are afraid of pizza because you once nearly choked to death eating it, all the amygdala remembers is that both of these experiences were scary. By contrast, other brain areas, such as cortex, ensures that all other aspects of these fearful events in your life are remembered.

New evidence, however, points to the amygdala being able to make distinctions among the fear memories it holds and retrieves.

Click here for the PhysOrg.com article.

Human Smell of Fear is Contagious

New research proves humans, when frightened, emit a particular odor that turns fear contagious. In fact, just a whiff of the odor of fear can turn an ambiguous situation into a frightening one.

"Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that human sweat contains emotional meanings," says Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston.

In a recent study, male participants watched neutral clips, slapstick comedies and horror flicks, while a gauze pad in their armpits collected sweat. Later, female participants smelled the gauze pads as they watched images of faces that changed from somewhat happy to neutral to somewhat fearful.

• Researchers chose males as sweat donors because of their larger apocrine sweat glands. The men used only scent-free shampoo, conditioner and soap provided by the lab several days beforehand, and kept a diet journal to avoid odorous foods such as garlic, onion and asparagus.

• The study also used female respondents because of their better sense of smell and higher sensitivity to emotional cues.

The women were more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as fearful when they were smelling the "fear sweat," but only in the case of ambiguous faces. They still interpreted somewhat happy or somewhat scared faces according to what they saw.

Click here to read the complete LiveScience article.