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Sign in to iCloud to access your photos, videos, documents, notes, contacts, and more. Use your Apple ID or create a new account to start using Apple services.

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Sign in to iCloud to access your photos, videos, documents, notes, contacts, and more. Use your Apple ID or create a new account to start using Apple services.

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Sign in to iCloud to access your photos, videos, documents, notes, contacts, and more. Use your Apple ID or create a new account to start using Apple services.

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Tim Burton has built his career around an iconic visual aesthetic. Here’s how it evolved.

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Every Tim Burton movie is channeling specific visual influences — plus his own alienated childhood.

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We're not scared! Explore the role of fear in children's books across time. We can see how attitudes have changed from traditional fairytales and Victorian cautionary tales such as A Token for Children and William Carus Wilson's Child's First Tales.

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https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Mayor_of_Halloween_Town

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Infographic: Messing with a Mouse's Memory

Researchers have developed ways to manipulate neurons involved in a particular memory to make mice recall an experience or to remember something that never happened.

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Fear News, Articles | The Scientist Magazine® | Page 2

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Infographic: Messing with a Mouse's Memory Researchers have developed ways to manipulate neurons involved in a particular memory to make mice recall an experience or to remember something that never happened.

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A copse can beckon, with its dappled leaves and songbird trills. But linger past twilight, and tree, bush, and animal assume different dimensions. Trunks thicken and loom, bushes snatch at clothing, and the rustlings and skitters of feather and claw magnify. You become unsettled, unnerved. You run.

You do this because you're afraid. Even without direct evidence of danger, you're compelled to flee, to protect yourself. Why this compulsion? It's the work of your amygdala, a tiny almond-shaped structure in your brain. Sensory signals alert it; in turn, it triggers a cascade of activity, deluging your body with messages that widen your eyes, prick your ears, accelerate your heart, quicken your breathing, wrench your stomach, moisten your palms, and launch a full-body, organ-clenching, corpuscle-filling chill. You run quite simply because fear grips you.

"You could call the amygdala a relevance detector," says Nouchine Hadjikhani, an HMS associate professor of radiology who specializes in capturing the activity of the brain as it reacts to fear-provoking stimuli. "In less than 100 milliseconds, just one-tenth of a second, sensory information reaches the amygdala, which signals your brain to be aware. All your systems become more receptive. You're now ready to fight, freeze, or flee."

The good news is that, should the terror prove benign, you'll not long be in fear's thrall. For while your amygdala is providing survival insurance by spurring action, sensory clues are also traveling to your prefrontal cortex. The amygdala's action buys you additional milliseconds, during which you might glimpse a light, stumble upon a traveled road, or receive other sensory stimuli that your prefrontal cortex will use to temper the initial response. You will calm, completing an arc of reaction that has been key to mammalian survival through eons.

Investigating what drives that arc of reaction spurs much of today's research into the molecular mechanisms of the fear response. HMS scientists are providing tantalizing insights by explaining how we decipher danger in the gazes or body movements of others, by informing treatments for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, and even by providing clues to the gender-based underpinnings of human response to fear.

Fear Factors

A 2005 poll of U.S. teenagers revealed the power that emotion can have in searing fear-filled memories deeply; despite the teens' limited direct experience, terrorist attacks, war, and nuclear war held top-ten berths in a list of fears. This finding hints at a phenomenon that Hadjikhani and her colleagues study: the contagion of fear. In her research, Hadjikhani has found that humans, like other animals, can experience fear indirectly, the result of another's glance or muscle tensing, or, on a larger scale, that electric connection that turns a milling crowd into a stampeding throng.

Nouchine Hadjikhani

"We're born into this world with a system to read other people's expressions," says Hadjikhani. "Ten minutes after we're born, we're already oriented more to faces than to objects." In 2008, Hadjikhani and colleagues reported on their investigation of one aspect of facial expression-the gaze-and its role in communicating danger. They found that while a direct gaze from a fear-filled face triggers activity in fear-response regions of the brain, the response is not as complex as that elicited by a fear-filled face in which the eyes are averted. A direct gaze signals an interaction between participants who know themselves to be non-threatening. But an averted gaze, "pointing with the eyes," as the researchers call it, flags a possible environmental danger and sparks activity in brain regions skilled at reading faces, interpreting gazes, processing fear, and detecting motion.

In other research, Hadjikhani found that the brain can recognize happy and fearful expressions in body movements. A fearful posture-hands held open and in front of the body like shields, for example-activates brain regions that oversee emotion, vision, and action, while postures of happiness-arms loosely held from the body as if opened to embrace-spur activity only in vision-processing regions.

These physical communications of actual or perceived danger offer one avenue to developing a conditioned fear, a learned response founded upon emotion and impressed so firmly within memory that it remains active for a lifetime.

Raising the Dread

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, roughly 19 million people in the United States have mental illnesses that involve persistent, outsized fear responses to seemingly ordinary stimuli. A door slam becomes a gun's report to a shattered combat veteran, for example, while smoke from burning leaves might trigger smell-based memories of pyres for a genocide survivor. Among the anxiety disorders linked to conditioned fear responses is one that's much in the news: post-traumatic stress disorder.

For more than a decade, Vadim Bolshakov, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry and director of McLean Hospital's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory, has explored fear-driven disorders by investigating their molecular bases in the brains of rats. One early finding from his laboratory showed that learned fear changes the way the animals' brains operate, offering a mechanism for conditioned fear's persistence.

Vadim Bolshakov

Bolshakov and colleagues taught rats to associate a harmless stimulus, a tone, with a painful event, a shock to their feet. The researchers found that neurons in the rodent amygdala exhibited remarkable sensitivity to the tone, so much so that the neurons continued to fire after the stimulus was removed. This sensitivity, known as long-term potentiation, is important to memory acquisition. It is normally modulated by glutamate, a chemical that is released into the synaptic spaces between neurons when a message is being passed, but then is deactivated to prevent message over-expression. Bolshakov's team showed that the amygdala's heightened sensitivity was the result of too much glutamate, either because the clean-up process failed or, as the researchers postulated, because production of the chemical went into overdrive.

Other studies by Bolshakov and colleagues identified two proteins essential to the innate and learned fear responses. When the researchers blocked production of one of the proteins, stathmin, fear-conditioned mice were less able to recall the learned fear-and lost the ability to recognize dangers that normally would have kicked their innate fear response into high gear. Blocking the gene that produced a protein known as transient receptor potential channel 5, normally found in high concentrations in the amygdala, decreased the rodents' neurons' sensitivity to cholecystokinin, a neuropeptide released when the innate fear response is triggered or a learned fear is recalled.

These insights are welcomed by Roger Pitman, an HMS professor of psychiatry, and Mohammed Milad, an HMS assistant professor of psychiatry. Based at Massachusetts General Hospital, these researchers seek to tease out treatments for people with anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Location, Location, Location

"You can never completely abolish a learned fear," says Pitman. "Learned fears are deep and may strengthen by reconsolidating after recall. One way to help patients diminish the impact of an anxiety-producing memory is to guide them to form a new memory that inhibits, or extinguishes, expression of the fearful memory during any recall attempt."

Roger Pitman

Or, as Pitman and colleagues discovered several years ago, people might be helped to stave off a fear-filled memory by preventing it from consolidating in the first place. In a controlled study of patients entering Mass General's emergency department after traumatic experiences-assaults or car accidents, for example-Pitman provided some participants with a placebo and others with propranolol, a drug that blocks the effects of the hormone adrenaline. At follow-up interviews participants listened to audiotapes of their own accounts of their trauma the day it occurred. Propranolol recipients had weaker physical responses to the tapes than placebo users, who showed physical signs of the stirring of their fearful memory despite time's passage.

Replicating these results has proven difficult, however, so Pitman and colleagues have shifted their focus to reactivating traumatic memories in people with post-traumatic stress disorder and then administering an anti-stress drug to try to weaken the memory's reconsolidation.

Reliving a fear, even a trauma-induced one, is not necessarily pathologic, Milad points out. Recalling the source of high emotion or injury can serve as a safeguard, a warning that our brains can tap as needed. In addition, time often softens the intensity of response.

"Say you're in a car accident," Milad adds. "It occurs at a particular intersection at the same time a certain song is playing on the radio. For a period following that accident, whenever you go through that intersection or hear that song, you will re-experience at some level your initial fear. If over time nothing horrible happens to rekindle your memory, your conditioned response to either stimulus will lessen until the fear is extinguished. This extinction doesn't erase the initial learned fear; instead, it leads to forming a new memory, a 'safety memory.' The learned fear-the neuronal connections that the experience formed within your amygdala and between your amygdala and certain cortical structures-remains."

For some, the trauma never lessens. In people with post-traumatic stress disorder, Milad and Pitman have found that two brain regions involved in extinction, the hippocampus and a region of the prefrontal cortex, function at a lesser capacity, while activity in the amygdala and the dorsal anterior cingulate, a region involved in cognition and motor control, rachets up. These findings may explain the unending rawness that trauma-induced fears bring to people with the disorder.

X Factor

Other research by these investigators suggests that hormones and biological cycles may play significant roles in fear learning and extinction.

"Although some data suggest that estrogen actually enhances fear learning," says Milad, "other studies suggest the opposite, that it reduces fear and anxiety. Unfortunately, the area is underinvestigated. Anxiety disorders, for example, are twice as high in women-and we can't say precisely why."

Mohammed Milad

The researchers' work does provide intriguing clues, however. They have found that women with higher estrogen levels showed stronger activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region key to fear control. These high-estrogen women were good at extinguishing fear. When the researchers repeated the study in rats and manipulated estrogen levels, they found that blocking estrogen impaired the animals' ability to control fear. Reintroducing estrogen caused the rats to behave as if they felt safe.

Curiously, the researchers found that men's ability to control fear was akin to that of high-estrogen women. How does it jibe, then, that women have twice the prevalence of anxiety disorders?

"We don't know," says Milad, "but the speculation is that estrogen alone doesn't make you a super-extinguisher. It may be the lack of the hormone that puts a woman at higher risk. If a woman's estrogen is high, she controls fear in a way comparable to men, but if her estrogen dips, as it would during a normal menstrual cycle, she may be at a higher risk for fear acquisition following a trauma or another emotion-laden incident."

Such studies by Milad and others highlight a growing interest in finely parsing the mechanisms of fear acquisition and extinction in humans. Fundamentally, though, our response to fear remains basic, a primitive emotion essential to our survival and a core response that unifies our species.

"The amygdala is the amygdala," says Milad. "Whether it's in Taipei or in Cedar Rapids, it's still a knee-jerk response to danger."
Ann Marie Menting is Associate Editor of Harvard Medicine. Images: Ocean/Corbis (top); Graham Gordon Ramsay (N.Hadjikhani); Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office (V.Bolshakov); John Soares (R.Pittman, M.Milad)

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A copse can beckon, with its dappled leaves and songbird trills. But linger past twilight, and tree, bush, and animal assume different dimensions. Trunks thicken and loom, bushes snatch at clothing, and the rustlings and skitters of feather and claw magnify. You become unsettled, unnerved. You run. You do this because you're afraid.

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https://www.johnhurford.co.uk/

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http://www.stephengibb.com/gallery/surreal-art-and-the-pervasive-nature-of-phobias/

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https://doitbeforeme.com/surreal-art/

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https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/in_depth/the-new-surrealism-contemporary-women-artists-against-alternative-facts-55944

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https://www.theartofskinner.com/

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https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.designboom.com%2Fdesign%2Fheinz-edelmann-1934-2009%2F&psig=AOvVaw0PluldZgLnNkJGlzo3yOON&ust=1615991925784000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAkQjhxqFwoTCICispeFte8CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAF

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Can I use elements of this project?

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relates to fears and phobias (wasps)

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Similar style for fear of bugs?

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https://www.demilked.com/alphabet-of-phobias-fears-parker-giphy/

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What are phobias?

A phobia is an excessive and irrational fear reaction. If you have a phobia, you may experience a deep sense of dread or panic when you encounter the source of your fear. The fear can be of a certain place, situation, or object. Unlike general anxiety disorders, a phobia is usually connected to something specific.

The impact of a phobia can range from annoying to severely disabling. People with phobias often realize their fear is irrational, but they're unable to do anything about it. Such fears can interfere with work, school, and personal relationships.

An estimated 19 million Americans have a phobia that causes difficulty in some area of their lives. Seek the help of your doctor if you have a fear that prevents you from leading your fullest life.

Genetic and environmental factors can cause phobias. Children who have a close relative with an anxiety disorder are at risk of developing a phobia. Distressing events, such as nearly drowning, can bring on a phobia. Exposure to confined spaces, extreme heights, and animal or insect bites can all be sources of phobias.

People with ongoing medical conditions or health concerns often have phobias. There's a high incidence of people developing phobias after traumatic brain injuries. Substance abuse and depression are also connected to phobias.

Phobias have different symptoms from serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. In schizophrenia, people have visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, negative symptoms such as anhedonia, and disorganized symptoms. Phobias may be irrational, but people with phobias do not fail reality testing.

Agoraphobia is a fear of places or situations that you can't escape from. The word itself refers to "fear of open spaces." People with agoraphobia fear being in large crowds or trapped outside the home. They often avoid social situations altogether and stay inside their homes.

Many people with agoraphobia fear they may have a panic attack in a place where they can't escape. Those with chronic health problems may fear they will have a medical emergency in a public area or where no help is available.

Social phobia is also referred to as social anxiety disorder. It's extreme worry about social situations and it can lead to self-isolation. A social phobia can be so severe that the simplest interactions, such as ordering at a restaurant or answering the telephone, can cause panic. People with social phobia often go out of their way to avoid public situations.

Many people dislike certain situations or objects, but to be a true phobia, the fear must interfere with daily life. Here are a few more of the most common ones:

Glossophobia: This is known as performance anxiety, or the fear of speaking in front of an audience. People with this phobia have severe physical symptoms when they even think about being in front of a group of people. < Glossophobia treatments can include either therapy or medication.

Acrophobia: This is the fear of heights. People with this phobia avoid mountains, bridges, or the higher floors of buildings. Symptoms include vertigo, dizziness, sweating, and feeling as if they'll pass out or lose consciousness.

Claustrophobia: This is a fear of enclosed or tight spaces. Severe claustrophobia can be especially disabling if it prevents you from riding in cars or elevators. < Learn more about claustrophobia, from additional symptoms to treatment options.

Aviophobia: This is also known as the fear of flying.

Dentophobia: Dentophobia is a fear of the dentist or dental procedures. This phobia generally develops after an unpleasant experience at a dentist's office. It can be harmful if it prevents you from obtaining needed dental care.

Hemophobia: This is a phobia of blood or injury. A person with hemophobia may faint when they come in contact with their own blood or another person's blood.

Arachnophobia: This means fear of spiders.

Cynophobia: This is a fear of dogs.

Ophidiophobia: People with this phobia fear snakes.

Nyctophobia: This phobia is a fear of the nighttime or darkness. It almost always begins as a typical childhood fear. When it progresses past adolescence, it's considered a phobia.

People with a genetic predisposition to anxiety may be at high risk of developing a phobia. Age, socioeconomic status, and gender seem to be risk factors only for certain phobias. For example, women are more likely to have animal phobias. Children or people with a low socioeconomic status are more likely to have social phobias. Men make up the majority of those with dentist and doctor phobias.

The most common and disabling symptom of a phobia is a panic attack. Features of a panic attack include:

A person with a phobia doesn't have to have panic attacks for accurate diagnosis, however.

Treatment for phobias can involve therapeutic techniques, medications, or a combination of both.

Cognitive behavioral therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most commonly used therapeutic treatment for phobias. It involves exposure to the source of the fear in a controlled setting. This treatment can decondition people and reduce anxiety.

The therapy focuses on identifying and changing negative thoughts, dysfunctional beliefs, and negative reactions to the phobic situation. New CBT techniques use virtual reality technology to expose people to the sources of their phobias safely.

Medication

Antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications can help calm emotional and physical reactions to fear. Often, a combination of medication and professional therapy is the most helpful.

If you have a phobia, it's critical that you seek treatment. Overcoming phobias can be difficult, but there's hope. With the right treatment, you can learn to manage your fears and lead a productive, fulfilling life.

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Phobias: Causes, Types, Treatment, Symptoms & More

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What are phobias? A phobia is an excessive and irrational fear reaction. If you have a phobia, you may experience a deep sense of dread or panic when you encounter the source of your fear. The fear can be of a certain place, situation, or object.

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A phobia is an irrational fear of something that's unlikely to cause harm. The word itself comes from the Greek word"phobos," which means "fear" or "horror."

Hydrophobia, for example, literally translates to fear of water.

When someone has a phobia, they experience intense fear of a certain object or situation. Phobias are different from regular fears because they cause significant distress, possibly interfering with life at home, work, or school.

People with phobias actively avoid the phobic object or situation, or they endure it with intense fear or anxiety.

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5), the American Psychiatric Association outlines several of the most common phobias.

Agoraphobia, a fear of places or situations that trigger fear or helplessness, is singled out as a particularly common fear with its own unique diagnosis. Social phobias, which are fears related to social situations, are also singled out with a unique diagnosis.

Phobias come in all shapes and sizes. Because there are an infinite number of objects and situations, the list of specific phobias is quite long.

According to the DSM-5, specific phobias typically fall within five general categories:

fears related to animals (spiders, dogs, insects)

fears related to the natural environment (heights, thunder, darkness)

fears related to blood, injury, or medical issues (injections, broken bones, falls)

fears related to specific situations (flying, riding an elevator, driving)

other (fear of choking, loud noises, drowning)

These categories encompass an infinite number of specific objects and situations.

There's no official list of phobias beyond what's outlined in the DSM-5, so clinicians and researchers create names for them as the need arises. This is typically done by combining a Greek (or sometimes Latin) prefix that describes the phobia with the - phobia suffix.

For example, a fear of water would be named by combining "hydro" (water) and "phobia" (fear).

There's also such a thing as a fear of fears (phobophobia). This is actually more common than you might imagine.

People with anxiety disorders sometimes experience panic attacks when they're in certain situations. These panic attacks can be so uncomfortable that people do everything they can to avoid them in the future.

For example, if you have a panic attack while sailing, you may fear sailing in the future, but you may also fear panic attacks or fear developing hydrophobia.

Studying specific phobias is a complicated process. Most people don't seek treatment for these conditions, so cases largely go unreported.

These phobias also vary based on cultural experiences, gender, and age.

Here's a look at some phobias that have been identified.

Phobias are typically treated with therapy, medication, or a combination of both:

Exposure therapy. During exposure therapy, which is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy, you work with a psychologist to learn how to desensitize yourself to the object or situation that you fear. The goal is to improve your quality of life so that you're no longer hindered or distressed by your fear.

Antianxiety medication. Your doctor may recommend certain anxiety-reducing medications that can help you through exposure therapy. While these medications aren't exactly a treatment for phobias, they can help make exposure therapy less distressing.

Other medications. Your clinician might also prescribe beta-blockers and benzodiazepines to manage feelings of anxiety or panic.

Phobias are persistent, intense, and unrealistic fears of a certain object or situation. Specific phobias are related to certain objects and situations. They typically involve fears related to animals, natural environments, medical issues, or specific situations.

While phobias can be extremely uncomfortable and challenging, therapy and medication can help. If you think you may have a phobia that's causing a disruption in your life, speak with your doctor for an evaluation and treatment options.

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Can I Be Afraid of Phobias? Common or Unique Fears Explained

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A phobia is an irrational fear of something that's unlikely to cause harm. The word itself comes from the Greek word"phobos," which means "fear" or "horror." Hydrophobia, for example, literally translates to fear of water. When someone has a phobia, they experience intense fear of a certain object or situation.

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The mass media present many images and ideas that have the capacity to worry, frighten, or even traumatize children. Researchers as far back as the 1930s and 1940s expressed concern that children were experiencing nightmares after going to the movies or listening to radio dramas. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the incidence of fears and nightmares was reported in several books about the effect of television on children. By the late 1960s, however, concern about youth violence led researchers to focus mainly on the potential of the media to contribute to violent behavior in children, and little attention was paid to the potential negative emotional effects of exposure to television and movies.

By the 1970s, George Gerbner began studying what he termed the "mean-world" syndrome. Through his "cultivation" paradigm, Gerbner argued that because television programming contains much more violence than actually exists in the real world, people who watch a large amount of television come to view the world as a mean and dangerous place. The research of Gerbner and his associates (1994) has shown, for example, that heavy television viewers exceed light viewers in their estimates of the chances of being involved in violence and that they are also more prone to believe that others cannot be trusted.

Gerbner's research has focused primarily on viewers' beliefs about the world rather than on viewers' emotions. However, research in the late 1990s revealed that heavy television viewing is associated with fears, nightmares, and even symptoms of psychological trauma. A 1998 survey by Mark Singer and his associates of two thousand elementary and middle school children in Ohio showed that as the number of hours of television viewing per day increased, so did the prevalence of symptoms of anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress. Similarly, a 1999 survey by Judith Owens and her collaborators of the parents of almost five hundred elementary school children in Rhode Island revealed that heavy television viewing (especially television viewing at bedtime) was significantly related to sleep disturbances. In the Owens study, almost 10 percent of the parents reported that their child experienced television-induced nightmares as frequently as once a week.

Fright Reactions to Individual Programs and Movies

The fright-producing effect of media depictions has more frequently been studied in terms of the immediate emotional effect of specific programs and movies. There is ample evidence, in fact, that the fear induced by mass media exposure is often intense and long-lasting, with sometimes debilitating effects. In a 1980 study by Brian Johnson, 40 percent of a random sample of adults admitted that they had seen a motion picture that had disturbed them "a great deal," and the median length of the reported disturbance was three full days. On the basis of their descriptions of the type and duration of their symptoms (such as nervousness, depression, fear of specific things, recurring thoughts and images), 48 percent of these respondents (19% of the total sample) were judged to have experienced, for at least two days, a "significant stress reaction" as the result of watching a movie.

Two retrospective studies of adults' detailed memories of having been frightened by a television show or movie were published in 1999, one conducted at Kansas State University by Steven Hoekstra and his associates and the other at the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin by Kristen Harrison and Joanne Cantor. These independently conceived studies provided further evidence of the prevalence, severity, and duration of fears induced by the media. The data revealed that the presence of vivid memories of enduring media-induced fear was nearly universal among college undergraduates. Both studies reported that generalized anxiety, mental preoccupation, fear of specific things or situations, and sleep disturbances are quite common consequences of exposure to the media. Moreover, in the Harrison and Cantor study, one-third of the students who reported having been frightened said that the fear effects had lasted more than one year. Indeed, more than one-fourth of the respondents said that the emotional effect of the program or movie (viewed an average of six years earlier) was still with them at the time of reporting. Typical long-term reactions were the refusal to swim in the ocean (or even in lakes) after seeing the killer-shark movie Jaws, and anxiety about taking showers after viewing the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho, in which the heroine is slashed to death while taking a shower.

A 1991 experiment by Cantor and Becky Omdahl explored the effect of witnessing scary media events on the subsequent behavioral choices of children in kindergarten through fifth grade. In this experiment, exposure to dramatized depictions of a deadly house fire or a drowning increased children's self-reports of worry about similar events in their own lives. More important, these fictional depictions affected the children's preferences for normal, everyday activities that were related to the tragedies they had just witnessed: Children who had seen a movie depicting a drowning expressed less willingness to go canoeing than other children; and those who had seen the program about a house fire were less eager to build a fire in a fireplace.

The most extreme reactions reported in the literature come from psychiatric case studies in which acute and disabling anxiety states enduring several days to several weeks or more (some necessitating hospitalization) are said to have been precipitated by the viewing of horror movies such as The Exorcist and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Most of the patients in the cases cited did not have previously diagnosed psychiatric problems, but the viewing of the film was seen as occurring in conjunction with other stressors in the lives of the patients.

Age Differences in Fright Responses

A large body of research has examined developmental differences in media-induced fears and how to cope with them. Cantor and her associates have conducted a series of experiments and surveys to test expectations based on theories and findings in cognitive development research. Cantor summarized many of these findings in a 1994 review article and in a 1998 book for parents. The experiments in this research program involved the showing of relatively mild, short clips of television programs and movies to children of different ages to test rigorously controlled variations in program content and viewing conditions. After viewing, children have reported on their feelings and interpretations, and these self-report measures have often been supplemented with physiological measures, such as the videotaping and systematic coding of facial expressions of emotion and/or behavioral measures of approach and avoidance. In contrast, the surveys have investigated the responses of children who were exposed to a particular mass media offering in their natural environment, without any researcher intervention. Although less tightly controlled, the surveys have permitted the study of responses to much more intensely frightening media fare, and have looked at responses occurring under more natural conditions.

It might seem likely that children would become less and less susceptible to all media-produced emotional disturbances as they grew older. However, this is not the case. As children mature cognitively, some things become less likely to disturb them, whereas other things become potentially more upsetting. As a first generalization, the relative importance of the immediately perceptible components of a fear-inducing media stimulus decreases as the age of a child increases. Research findings support the generalization that preschool children (approximately three to five years of age) are more likely to be frightened by something that looks scary but is actually harmless than by something that looks attractive but is actually harmful; for older elementary school children (approximately nine to eleven years of age), appearance carries much less weight, relative to the behavior or destructive potential of a character, animal, or object.

One study that supported this generalization was based on a survey that asked parents to name the programs and films that had frightened their children the most. In this survey, parents of pre-school children most often mentioned offerings with grotesque-looking, unreal characters, such as the television series The Incredible Hulk and the feature film The Wizard of Oz ; parents of older elementary school children more often mentioned programs or movies (such as The Amityville Horror) that involved threats without a strong visual component, and that required a good deal of imagination to comprehend. Another study found similar results using the self-reports of children rather than the observations of parents. Both surveys included controls for possible differences in exposure patterns in the different age groups.

The results from a laboratory study that involved an episode of The Incredible Hulk supported the generalization that resulted from the surveys. In the survey that asked parents about what programs frightened their children the most, this program had spontaneously been mentioned by 40 percent of the parents of preschoolers. The laboratory study concluded that the unexpectedly intense reactions of preschool children to this program were partially due to their overresponse to the visual image of the Hulk character. When participants were shown a shortened episode of the program and were asked how they had felt during different scenes, preschool children reported the most fear after the attractive, mild-mannered hero was transformed into the monstrous-looking Hulk. Older elementary school children, in contrast, reported the least fear at this time, because they understood that the Hulk was really the benevolent hero in another physical form, and that he was using his superhuman powers to rescue a character who was in danger.

Another experiment tested the effect of appearance more directly, by creating a story in four versions, so that a major character was either attractive and grandmother-looking or ugly and grotesque. The behavior of the character was also varied-she was depicted as either kind or cruel- creating four versions of the same story. In other words, the main character was either attractive and kind, attractive and cruel, ugly and kind, or ugly and cruel, while all other aspects of the story were held constant. In judging how nice or mean the character was and in predicting what she would do in the subsequent scene, preschool children were more influenced than older children (six to ten years of age) by the looks of the character. The preschool children were less influenced than the older children by her kind or cruel behavior. As the age of the child increased, the looks of the character became less important and her behavior carried increasing weight.

A second generalization from research in this area is that as children mature, they become more responsive to realistic dangers and less responsive to fantastic dangers depicted in the media. The survey of parents mentioned earlier supported this trend. In general, the tendency of parents to mention fantasy offerings (depicting events that could not possibly occur in the real world) as sources of fear decreased as the age of the child increased, and the tendency to mention fictional offerings (depicting events that could possibly occur) increased. Further support for this generalization comes from a survey of the fright responses of children to television news. A random survey of parents of children in kindergarten through sixth grade showed that fear produced by fantasy programs decreased as the grade of the child increased, while fear induced by news stories increased with age.

A third generalization from research is that as children mature, they become frightened by media depictions involving increasingly abstract concepts. Data supporting this generalization come from a survey of children's responses to the made-for-television movie The Day After. Although many people were concerned about the reactions of young children to this movie, which depicted the devastation of a Kansas community by a nuclear attack, the survey showed that the emotional effect of this movie increased as the age of the viewer increased. Similarly, a survey of the reactions of children to television coverage of the Persian Gulf War showed that preschool and elementary school children were more likely to be frightened by the concrete, visual aspects of the coverage (such as the missiles exploding), whereas teenagers were more disturbed by the abstract components of the story (such as the possibility of the conflict spreading).

Developmental Differences in the Effectiveness of Coping Strategies

Research in cognitive development has also been used to determine the best ways to help children cope with fear-producing media stimuli or to reduce the fear reactions of children once they occur. In general, preschool children benefit more from "noncognitive" strategies, that is, those that do not involve the processing of verbal information and that appear to be relatively automatic; by the latter elementary school years and beyond, children benefit from both cognitive and noncognitive strategies, although they tend to prefer cognitive strategies.

The process of visual desensitization, or gradual exposure to scary images in a nonthreatening context, is a noncognitive strategy that has been shown to be effective for both preschool and older elementary school children in several experiments. In one experiment, for example, prior exposure to a realistic rubber replica of a tarantula reduced the emotional effect of a scene involving tarantulas from the movie Kingdom of the Spiders.

Other noncognitive strategies involve physical activities, such as clinging to an attachment object or having something to eat or drink. Children seem to be intuitively aware that physical techniques work better for younger than for older children. In a survey of the perceptions of children of the effectiveness of strategies for coping with media-induced fright, the evaluations of preschool children of "holding onto a blanket or a toy" and "getting something to eat or drink" were significantly more positive than those of older elementary school children.

In contrast to noncognitive strategies, cognitive (or "verbal") strategies involve verbal information that is used to cast the threat in a different light. These strategies involve relatively complex cognitive operations, and research consistently finds such strategies to be more effective for older than for younger children.

When dealing with fantasy depictions, the most typical cognitive strategy seems to be to provide an explanation focusing on the unreality of the situation. This strategy should be especially difficult for preschool children, who do not have a full grasp of the implications of the fantasy-reality distinction. In one experiment, for example, older elementary school children who were told to remember that what they were seeing in The Wizard of Oz was not real showed less fear than their classmates who received no instructions. The same instructions did not help preschoolers, however. Research also shows that older children have greater confidence than preschoolers in the effectiveness of this strategy.

For media depictions involving realistic threats, the most prevalent cognitive strategy seems to be to provide an explanation that minimizes the perceived likelihood of the depicted danger. This type of strategy is not only more effective with older children than with younger children, in certain situations it has been shown to be misunderstood by younger children, causing them to become more, rather than less, frightened.

Studies have also shown that the effectiveness of cognitive strategies for young children can be improved by providing visual demonstrations of verbal explanations, and by encouraging repeated rehearsal of simplified, reassuring information. It is clear from these studies that it is an extremely challenging task to explain away media images and threatening situations that have induced fear in a child, particularly when there is a strong perceptual component to the threatening stimulus, and when the reassurance can only be partial or probabilistic, rather than absolute.

Parental Awareness and the Effects of Coviewing

It has been noted that parents often are not aware of the occurrence or severity of the fright reactions of their children. Research typically shows that parents' estimates of the frequency of their children's media-induced fright reactions are lower than the self-reports of the children. Parents also underestimate the exposure of their children to scary media. Research suggests that children often experience fright reactions to programs that many parents would not expect to be scary. Nevertheless, there is evidence that children are widely exposed to programs and movies that were originally intended for adults and that are considered frightening by a large proportion of adult moviegoers.

Research has focused on the role that coviewing can play in reducing fright reactions to media. Surveys have shown that children often attempt to comfort coviewers when they become frightened, using strategies ranging from distraction to a complicated reassuring explanation. One experiment showed that older siblings often spontaneously try to comfort younger ones when they watch a scary movie and that these attempts can be effective.

Gender Differences

There is a common stereotype that girls are more easily frightened than boys, and indeed that females in general are more emotional than males. There is quite a bit of research that would seem to support this contention, although the gender differences may be less strong than they appear at first glance. Moreover, the observed gender differences seem to be partially attributable to socialization pressures on girls to express their fears and on boys to inhibit them.

A meta-analysis by Eugenia Peck (1999)-of the studies of media-induced fear that were produced between 1987 and 1996-reported a "moderate" gender-difference effect size (0.41-on a scale from 0 to 1). The responses of females were more intense than those of males for all dependent measures. However, the effect sizes were largest for self-report and behavioral measures (those that are under the most conscious control) and smallest for heart rate and facial expressions. In addition, the effect size for gender differences increased as the age of the research participant increased.

There is some evidence of gender differences in the coping strategies used to counteract media-induced fear, and these gender differences may also reflect gender-role socialization pressures. As Cantor (2000) has observed, two surveys have reported that females use noncognitive coping strategies more often than males but that the two genders do not differ in their use of cognitive strategies. These findings may suggest that because boys are less willing than girls to show their emotions, they avoid noncognitive strategies (such as covering their eyes or seeking social support), which are usually apparent to others. In contrast, the two genders employ cognitive strategies (such as thinking about nonthreatening aspects of the frightening event) with equal frequency because these strategies are less readily observable.

Although more research is needed to explore the extent of gender differences in media-induced fear and the factors that contribute to them, these findings suggest that the size of the gender difference may be partially a function of social pressures to conform to gender-appropriate behavior.

Shielding Children from Harm

As television and movies have become more intense and more graphic in their depictions, parents have sought ways of taking more control over the exposure of their children to media. The movie rating system developed in the late 1960s by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has undergone several modifications in response to the wishes of parents. In addition, in the late 1990s, the U.S. Congress mandated the inclusion of V-chips in new television sets to permit parents to block programs on the basis of ratings, and the television industry developed a rating system designed to work with this new technology. Parental education and media literacy programs also proliferated during the 1990s to help parents and children cope with the rapidly expanding availability of diverse forms of media content.

See also: Cultivation Theory and Media Effects; Gender and the Media; Parental Mediation of Media Effects; Ratings for Movies; Ratings for Television Programs; V-Chip; Violence in the Media, Attraction to; Violence in the Media, History of Research on.

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Joanne Cantor

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FEAR AND THE MEDIAThe mass media present many images and ideas that have the capacity to worry, frighten, or even traumatize children. Researchers as far back as the 1930s and 1940s expressed concern that children were experiencing nightmares after going to the movies or listening to radio dramas.

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Specific fears and phobias | The British Journal of Psychiatry | Cambridge Core

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This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef. MD, ChristerAllgulander 1999. Invited comment. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, Vol. 100, Issue. 3, p. 245. Andrade, Laura 2000. Surveys of morbidity and psychiatric comorbidity. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, Vol. 13, Issue. 2, p.