Fear itself: Experts ponder the genesis of fear

Kirk Baird

Monday, Aug. 20, 2001 | 8:24 a.m.

You're alone in a long, dark back-street alley. It's just past midnight as you begin to walk slowly to your car. Suddenly you think you hear something ... echoes of your own footsteps, or perhaps it's from someone approaching from behind.

You speed up by a step or two. Thoughts of a crazed maniac you'd heard about on television the night before are pushing forward in your mind.

Finally you reach your car, fumbling for the key to unlock the door. As you hastily drive home, a calmness takes over.

You can't help but feel a little embarrassed almost childish for the feelings you had only minutes ago.

But were you afraid to begin with?

Dr. Patricia Shinnick-Gallagher, a professor in pharmacology and toxicology at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, could have the answer.

Shinnick-Gallagher studies what triggers fright in humans.

She conducts tests on rats to determine if they can be "trained" to feel fear or anxiety to particular stimuli, in what amounts to a modern-day version of Ivan Pavlov's experiments on dogs in the early 20th century.

Commonly known as classic conditioning, this learned behavior is something humans experience as well, she said.

"On television programs today people run into alleys when it's dark and they get jumped on," Shinnick-Gallagher said. "When a person has watched that type of show and has that type of association, they will feel that type of anxiety" when alone at night in an alley.

"It doesn't have to be something they personally experienced, but a visual association. It's a conditioned response."

Fear, in part, has led Ruben Gonzalez, 36, to a change in lifestyle.

Tired of what he perceived as increased hostility in the world especially in crowds the Las Vegas resident of eight years said he prefers to bank online and to shop at the grocery store during odd hours.

"There's too much stress in the world," he said. "I don't like watching people get aggressive with each other."

That perception, Gonzalez said, is due in part to what he's seen on TV and read in newspapers. That opinion doesn't surprise Dr. Gary Solomon, a psychology professor at the Community College of Southern Nevada in Henderson.

"The first thing (the media) reports is rape, robbery, murder," Solomon said. "It almost appears as if the media enjoys the adrenaline rush that fear induces. We've become terrified of the world around us because we believe these experiences are representative of the world around us. But it's not."

In fact, U.S. Department of Justice statistics show that the national crime rate has been in steady decline since 1994, reaching its lowest levels last year. And Metro Police statics indicate the same decrease as well, with crime down in Las Vegas since 1995.

Nevertheless, there is an increasing fear of crime in society. While fear is impossible to accurately measure -- what frightens one person severely may only be a mild scare to someone else -- the increase in the number of gated communities and self-defense weapons, as well as laws that allow for concealed handguns, seems to be a good indicator that if society is not more fearful, it's certainly more on edge.

Which perplexes Barry Glassner, USC professor of sociology and author of "Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things" (Basic Books, 1999).

"We live in about the safest times in human history, and yet a large number of people are very fearful and, in many cases, their fears are exaggerated or unfounded," Glassner said.

For that he also places much of the responsibility on the media.

"If you watch much local TV news, you will never appreciate that your community is quite safe and that crime rates are down because the lead stories are almost always crime stories," he said.

Glassner also said that 50 or 100 years ago when a crime occurred, the only means in which to spread news was through word of mouth or newspapers.

"But now almost everyone in the country is going to hear about it through national TV news," he said.

Sh-sh-sh-shark!

Perhaps there's no better example of exposure on national TV than the sudden coverage devoted to shark attacks.

In 1916 a rogue great white shark attacked five swimmers along the New Jersey Shore in the course of two weeks.

As chronicled in the recent book "Close to Shore" by Michael Capuzzo (Broadway Books), these were the first documented cases of a shark going after humans. As press from nearby cities descended on the coastal area to report on the shark menace, a climate of fear seized the northeast. Were the waters no longer safe?

To those living in Texas, Nevada, California and most anywhere west of the Mississippi River, news of the attacks traveled slowly -- and by the time it did reach them, it was often greeted with an attitude of "so what?"

Almost exactly 85 years after the New Jersey attacks began, a bull shark savaged an 8-year-old boy in shallow water off a beach in Pensacola, Fla.

As the boy clung to life in a hospital room recently the media frenzy began. There were updates on the boy's condition as well as stories of the heroism his uncle showed in rescuing the boy and dragging the 200-pound shark to the shore barehanded. Always there was the lingering question: How safe are we in the oceans?

Then reports of other attacks began trickling in -- the timing, as far as the media was concerned, couldn't be better. Shark experts were placed in front of TV camera to shed light on the dark menace of the oceans, which were responsible for 79 unprovoked attacks in 2000.

Even though statistically you are 30 times more likely to be killed by lightening than to be attacked by a shark, to those who had seen the movie "Jaws," fear of sharks was palpable and something that could be exploited.

For Carol Wolff, 56, a Las Vegas resident for four years, the media coverage about shark attacks has had an effect. She's more aware of the fish than ever before.

"I respect the environment and I'm not fearful," she said, "but I'll probably never swim in the ocean again. It's (the sharks') environment, not mine."

Media images

And it's not only images of marauding sharks that has been planted into our subconscious. The 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., convinced many parents that schools were no longer safe for children.

Nevermind that school-crime rates are declining, according to a 1999 annual report on school safety conducted by the U.S. Department of Education and Justice Department; or, an even more recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on violence in schools, which stated that less than 1 percent of all homicides or suicides of school-aged children (5-19 years old) occurred in or around school grounds or on the way to or from school.

It's the aerial footage of the teenagers fleeing Columbine High School that is burned into the collective memories of Americans, and we can't shake it, said Al Tompkins, a broadcast writing and ethics professor at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"Columbine happened once, but how many times did you see pictures of children running from Columbine?" Tompkins said. "What happened is when we see these images over and over again -- these file or archival images -- it's seared into the minds of viewers or readers that they happen all the time. They exaggerate the danger because we see them over and over again and our reminded.

"It should be no surprise that parents got the idea that school violence is increasing ... when schools are safer by far than any place else a child will be during the day."

Fear and health

Although too much of anything is unhealthy, a little fear can be helpful and, in some cases, necessary.

"We generally think of (anxiety and fear) as negative emotions, but they're important," said Ned Kalin, chairman of psychiatry and director of the HealthEmotions Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin.

"They're emotions that don't feel good to us, but have adaptive and survival value to make sure we don't succumb to threats and be eaten by predators," he said. "Fear is a good thing because it tells us when we need to be careful in our environment."

Fear, however, becomes negative when it overwhelms our sense of reasoning and its intensity is out of proportion with our surroundings.

Kalin said there is strong evidence to suggest those who suffer from chronic debilitating fear may experience long-term health problems because of a stress hormone, cortisol, which is activated during incidents of stress or fear.

The hormone helps humans deal with increased demands from threatening or stressful situations.

"It revs up our biological machinary," he said. "The problem is when the hormone is elevated over the long term it can affect such things as sugar, metabolism, blood pressure, body weight, immune function and even bone density," Kalin said.

That's when the fear crosses over into phobia.

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, 8 percent of the U.S. population is phobic -- or, roughly 11.5 million people.

The difference between fear and phobia is vast, said Geralyn Lederman, communications and public relations director for the Anxiety Disorders Association of America in Rockville, Md.

For example, if someone is afraid of sharks he or she might be hesitant to go into the water, Lederman said. But if they have a phobia of sharks they're likely to get sweaty palms and have a panic attack while watching the predators cruise by in an aquarium.

"Phobias of sharks go beyond 'Should I go into the water?' " Lederman said. "It's, 'I'm not going into the shark house of the aquarium,' or, 'I can't read about them, I don't want to see pictures of them, let's not talk about sharks' because it makes them so uncomfortable."

Watching all the coverage given to sharks in recent weeks, it's easy to believe being mauled by a great white is at the top of many Americans' fears, but in fact being attacked by a shark doesn't even appear in a recent Gallup Poll about what adults fear most. Instead, snakes have that honor, followed by public speaking, heights, being closed in a small space, spiders and insects.

Oddly enough, it's these types of terrors -- and our fascination with them -- that prove society to be a safe place to live, Glassner said. For example, consider the success of NBC's "Fear Factor," a reality TV show that forces contestants to face common frights such as snakes, heights and insects.

"One of the things I would say about these kinds of shows is if we were living in dangerous times, people wouldn't want more feelings of danger from their nightly entertainment," Glassner said. "If we were in a world war or in a great depression, people would not be as receptive to these kinds of shows or those modest kinds of dangers we're talking about.

"You're not going to be worried about if your food had been irradiated if you don't have enough food (to eat). If you're living in squalor, you're not going to be worried about buying anti-bacterial soap."

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