Coming to terms with fear

By Joseph E LeDoux. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014

812 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Research on Pavlovian fear conditioning has been very successful in revealing what has come to be called the brain’s fear system. The field has now matured to the point where a sharper conceptualization of what is being studied could be very useful as we go forward. Terms like “fear conditioning” and “fear system” blur the distinction between processes that give rise to conscious feelings of fear and nonconscious processes that control defense responses elicited by threats. These processes interact but are not the same. Using terms that respect the distinction will help focus future animal research on brain circuits that detect and respond to threats, and should also help clarify the implications of this work for understanding how normal and pathological feelings of fear come about in the human brain. The brain mechanisms of fear have been studied extensively using Pavlovian fear conditioning, a procedure that allows exploration of how the brain learns about and later detects and responds to threats. However, mechanisms that detect and respond to threats are not the same as those that give rise to conscious fear. This is an important distinction because symptoms based on conscious and nonconscious processes may be vulnerable to different predisposing factors and may also be treatable with different approaches in people who suffer from uncontrolled fear or anxiety. A conception of so-called fear conditioning in terms of circuits that operate nonconsciously, but that indirectly contribute to conscious fear, is proposed as way forward.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/504ec1d1e3f00ea90dce224e79b4fc414e5c235d

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Citations in the corpus

Joy and Calm: How an Evolutionary Functional Model of Affect Regulation Informs Positive Emotions in Nature (2016, neutral): “Largely based upon the research of LeDoux (1998, 2014), the amygdala is well-established as playing a key role in the processing of emotional information, regulating emotional responses and controlling fear reactions in a range of species (see for example Fox et al. 2015; Phelps and Ledoux 2005 for…”
Insects have the capacity for subjective experience (2016, background): “The importance of distinguishing between instinctive behaviours generated by the brainstem and felt emotions generated by the cortex has been previously discussed extensively (LeDoux, 2012; LeDoux, 2013; LeDoux, 2014a; LeDoux, 2014b; Rolls, 2014a; Rolls, 2014b; Scott, 2014).”
Animal welfare with and without consciousness (2017, background): “…even in us the same behaviour can be performed through either a conscious or unconscious route, such a simplistic use of analogies between species is invalid and we can only justify the use of such analogies if we have much more detailed knowledge of the actual mechanisms involved (LeDoux, 2014).”
Landscapes of Fear: Spatial Patterns of Risk Perception and Response. (2019, background): “Outside of the landscape of fear literature, there remains considerable debate among psychologists and animal behavior scientists about the definition and measurement of fear in both humans and non-human animals [95,96].”
Using Anchor-Based Methods to Determine the Smallest Effect Size of Interest (2019, background): “For example, many emotion researchers are interested in the subjective experience of emotions (e.g., Campbell-Sills et al., 2006; Coutinho & Cangelosi, 2011; Gross, 1999; Kuppens, 2019; LeDoux, 2014; LeDoux & Hofmann, 2018; Reisenzein, 2009; Troy et al., 2018).”
Why fish do not feel pain (2016, background): “The importance of distinguishing between instinctive behaviours generated by the brainstem and felt emotions generated by the cortex has been previously discussed extensively (LeDoux, 2012; LeDoux, 2013; LeDoux, 2014a; LeDoux, 2014b; Rolls, 2014a; Rolls, 2014b; Scott, 2014).”
Optimizing Exposure Therapy for Anxiety Disorders: An Inhibitory Learning and Inhibitory Regulation Approach (2015, background): “Such a discord between level of fear expressed and underlying associative mechanisms has been well established [LeDoux, 2014].”
UPDATED META‐ANALYSIS OF CLASSICAL FEAR CONDITIONING IN THE ANXIETY DISORDERS (2015, background): “Our understanding of the defense circuitry is primarily based on animal studies that use relatively simple fear-conditioning procedures, subsequently allowing for translational research.[2, 3] Although other translational models are feasible as well, human fear-conditioning studies demonstrated that”
Fear of the coronavirus (COVID-19): Predictors in an online study conducted in March 2020 (2020, neutral): “Fear is a subjective conscious experience (LeDoux, 2014) involving idiosyncratic concerns and fluctuations over time (Walz, Nauta, & aan het Rot, 2014).”