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Psychologically, panic denotes extreme dread, with an inability to reason or to reflect, usually in reaction to anticipated imminent annihilation. Physiologically, there are profound associated changes: palpitation, sweating, tremor, incontinence, and often random excited movements, more or less related to flight. The stimulus to panic may be real or imagined. It may occur to individuals as individuals, or as members of groups. It is often observed among gregarious animals. In this bulletin we shall concern ourselves with panic as a group reaction.
Essentially the ingredients of a panic-producing situation are three in number. First, a sudden, unanticipated, overwhelming threat to life; second, the absence of appropriate defense techniques to deal effectively with the presenting threat; and third, aggravation and summation of fear as a result of contagion, and as a result of fragmentation of the group.
That unanticipated occurrences generate anxiety is common knowledge. Psychic well-being requires that coming events shall more or less concur with one's expectations. If you reach for a step that isn't there, if the subway train which you expect to go north goes south, if someone comes up behind you unexpectedly — all such experiences beget anxiety. But it is not only the element of surprise that is frightening. Fear of the Unknown is equally disturbing. Military experience consists in large part in having had sufficient exposure so that nothing that is surprising or unknown is likely to be experienced. The civilian is hard put in war precisely because so much that may develop is entirely novel for him.
It will be evident therefore, that the less often the people of a nation are surprised, the less likely will excessive anxiety accrue from this source. To this end it is important that a government and press should provide accurate information and reasonable predictions as to what may ensue. Here lies the danger in blundering censorship. With realistic information unavail