Psychology Of Fear Research Paper

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As humans we are meant to feel. We are ruled by all sorts of emotions that shape who we are. From love, anger, desire, jealousy, disgust, shame and the list endlessly goes on… What are emotions? Emotions are complex. They are states of feelings that cause physical and psychological changes that influence our behavior. (CHERRY, 2015) These states can be attained in all sorts of everyday life situations. An intriguing and powerful feeling that everyone experiences is fear. Whether a snake is approaching your way or an armed man is threatening your life with his weapon, men experience physiological changes in the body when exposed to fear, also known as the fight-or-flight response. Fear is a distressing emotion that may have a bad and good influence on our lives. Its either an obstacle or a drive. In the first case, it’s blocking us from really existing and living life to our fullest potential and in the second it encourages us to push beyond it and serves as a survival mechanism. In both cases, the emotion of fear has a life altering effect.

Fear is universally defined as an “an unpleasant emotional state characterized by anticipation of pain or great distress…that evolved as a mechanism to protect humans from life threatening situations” (Merriam-Webster, 2002, …show more content…
Fear tends to numb us. Its effect can be short, a fearful situations, but it can be for a more extended period of time (months, years or even a lifetime). I'm going to refer to them as latent fear. We can be aware of it or it can subconscious. In the case where it is subconscious, people would act and live a certain way without knowing the latent motive that is controlling their actions. We could be conscious of these latent fears with no control over their effect. For instance, some people who fear failure and live accordingly lead a passive life and deny themselves the opportunity to try because they fear that they would
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