Have you ever wondered about the connection between fear and other emotions? If no, maybe it’s time to learn more about different theories?
Plutchik views personality traits as a combination of two or more primary emotions. For example, R. Plutchik offers the following formulas:
- pride = anger + joy;
- love = joy + acceptance;
- curiosity = surprise + acceptance;
- modesty = fear + acceptance;
- guilt = fear + joy.
Social regulators can be understood in the system as a combination of fear and other emotions, anxiety as a combination of fear and expectation. In his opinion, analysis of the situations that cause fear and identification of a person’s expectations in relation to such situations help to understand the dynamics of anxiety.
Different people are dominated by different emotions – this fact was studied in detail in the laboratory of I.Pavlov. He noted the tendency of the melancholic (weak type according to his classification) to the reaction of fear, the choleric to rage, the sanguine to joy.
Another physiologist P. Simonov said that these three emotions – fear, rage and pleasure – have their own zones in the brain, and individual differences in individuals with different temperaments are associated precisely with the predominant influence of one or another brain center. In this case, the dominant activity of the “center of fear” (responsible for the realization of the need for self-preservation), “center of rage” or “center of joy” will determine the nature of the typical emotional background of this or that person.
B.Dodonov argues that fear and distress are positively correlated with each other, and they also negatively correlate with joy. According to the scientist, we don’t need to experience positive emotional states constantly, but to have alternating feelings of optimal intensity.
American physiologist W. Cannon discovered that rage and fear have many of the same manifestations. Muscle blood circulation improves; hormones and glucose are released into the blood. All the body’s resources are mobilized for the upcoming fight (emotion of rage), or flight (emotion of fear).
Cooper notes that people who are prone to analyticity are characterized by reduced carelessness and cheerfulness, but increased anxiety. At the same time, in men, a predisposition to joy is associated with a tendency to anger, in women – with a predisposition to fear.
Izard notes that the tendency to fear can balance the predisposition to anger, keeping the individual from aggressive actions and conflicts.
Lazarus writes that aggression can be a reaction to the emotion of fear.
A.Zlobin noted that emotions are characterized by a clearly expressed mirror symmetry:
- anger-shame
- sadness-joy,
- fear-fearlessness.
He claims that each subsequent emotion can begin to act after the end of the previous one. The depth and intensity of the previous emotion are transmitted to the next emotion. But a system can go in cycles. In this case, after the emotion of anger, the emotion of fear is released again. The positive emotion of fearlessness is a specific state that represents the absence of any emotion, when a person has renounced sadness, anger, shame, and joy and acts decisively.
Thus, in real life, a person often experiences not just one emotion in its pure form but a whole set of emotions that are interconnected. Besides, only the strongest, most intense emotion is realized by a person. We assume that in almost all complexes of experienced emotions, fear is necessarily present either as a leading, fundamental emotion, when all the others are a poorly realized background, or it is itself a background for another experience.
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