Understanding Fear: A Comprehensive Study of the Human Response

Have you ever been stopped dead in your tracks due to a scary sight? Maybe you’ve felt this crawling feeling down your spine. Fear is a feeling is an emotion we all experience. What exactly is fear? Out of all our emotions, fear is known to be the most complex emotion felt by humans. What causes this feeling we all hate?

The brain is a profoundly complex organ. More than 100 billion nerve cells put together as the starting point of everything we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action, while others produce subconscious responses. The fear response is almost entirely subconscious: We respond in fear when we perceive danger or if we feel anticipation in a moment. We often try to avoid the feeling, but sadly, it can come at us even when we don’t expect it! Fear is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals that can cause a racing heartbeat, fast breathing and tightened muscles, among other things, also known as the fight-or-flight response. We don't consciously trigger it or even know what's going on until it has run its course. With other emotions, such as happiness, a substance, causing the emotion, is secreted slowly throughout

Frank Farley, professor at Temple University says otherwise. He said the reason a horror movie can make you fearful is because it relies on your brain to make connections between fake and real events.

“We know that there are horrendously awful people out there," Farley said. "It gets into your head and makes all the connections with real life. Even fake horror can affect people in real life by heightening their senses,” Farley said, “so that they start to be more afraid even after the lights come up. You can be afraid of some sounds or images and have a sense of fear, only because of the connection to real horror that you hear of,” he