Situations that Arouse Fear in Humans

… certain ideas of supernatural agency, associated with real circumstances, produce a peculiar kind of horror. This horror is probably explicable as the result of a combination of simpler horrors. To bring the ghostly terror to its maximum, many usual elements of the dreadful must combine, such as loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a dismal character, moving figures half-discerned …, and a vertiginous baffling of the expectation. This last element, which is intellectual, is very important.

Evidence is given (Chapters 3 and 4) of the distress and anxiety that are aroused when young creatures, human and other, are removed from a figure to whom they are attached and placed with strangers. In such circumstances, we know, behaviour is directed as least as much to regaining the familiar figure as it is to escaping from the strange people and situation. In those chapters attention is concentrated on the effects on behaviour of a single variable, presence or absence of mother; and thereby light is thrown on one-half of our problem, a half hitherto much neglected. It is time now to give attention to the other and more familiar half, the nature of some of the other variables that are likely to elicit one or another form of fear behaviour.

Not only are the forms of behaviour usually classified as fear behaviour heterogeneous, but so also, as we have seen, are the immediate situations and events that commonly elicit them. They include, besides being lost or alone, sudden noises and movements, strange objects and persons, animals, height, rapid approach, darkness, and anything we have learnt can cause pain. It is a motley list. And not only motley but the power of each situation or event to elicit fear is most uncertain. Where one person is afraid another is not. Where someone is unafraid today he is afraid tomorrow, or the other way round.

To all these immediate and concrete situations that are apt