Face the Beast and Fear the Face: Animal and Social Fears as Prototypes for Evolutionary Analyses of Emotion

TLDR

Animal fear is rooted in a predatory defense system that enables avoidance of predators, while social fears arise from a dominance/submissiveness system that mediates responses to conspecific threat, and both systems prepare stimuli to become learned fear elicitors, allowing rapid unconscious physiological reactions to fear‑relevant cues. The study applies a functional‑evolutionary perspective to fear during encounters with animals and threatening humans. The authors review supportive data and present an information‑processing model that is empirically tested to explain the causal relationships in the evolutionary analysis. Backward‑masking studies show that conditioned autonomic responses to fear‑relevant stimuli can be elicited even when the stimuli are masked.

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper applies a functional‐evolutionary perspective to fear in the context of encounters with animals and threatening humans. It is argued that animal fear originates in a predatory defense system whose function is to allow animals to avoid and escape predators. Animal stimuli are postulated to be differentially prepared to become learned elicitors of fear within this system. Social fears are viewed as originating in a dominance/submissiveness system. The function of submissiveness is to avert attacks from dominating conspecifics. Signs of dominance paired with aversive outcomes provide for learning fear to specific individuals. Data which in general are interpreted as supportive of this conceptualization are reviewed. To explain the mechanism behind the causal relationships suggested in the evolutionary analysis, an information‐processing model is presented and empirically tested. It is argued that responses to evolutionary fear‐relevant stimuli can elicit the physiological concomitants of fear after only a very quick, “unconsciousness,’ or preattentive stimulus analysis. Support for this notion is presented from backward masking studies where it is demonstrated that conditioned autonomic responses to fear‐relevant stimuli can be elicited even with masked stimuli.