This is your brain (and body) on fear

Today is a day some enjoy spooky fun. The Well spoke with Jonathan Abramowitz, professor of psychology and clinical psychology program director in the College of Arts and Sciences, about what causes the fear response in our bodies and brains, why some people respond differently to being scared and how the Halloween industry uses psychology to give us thrills and chills.

Jonathan Abramowitz

What happens in the brain when someone is afraid?

Whenever we perceive a threat — like in ancient times, if we faced a saber-toothed tiger, or something like that, some sort of predator — our brain sends a message to our endocrine system (which includes the adrenal glands), which sets in motion a whole cascade of events that are all part of that fight-or-flight, get-you-to-safety response. Your heart starts beating faster to circulate blood. You breathe faster to get more oxygen into your system so that your heart can circulate oxygenated blood, which your body uses for energy. Your muscles tense. You start to sweat. Collectively, this is called “sympathetic arousal” because it’s your sympathetic nervous system that is activated when we perceive a threat.

There is also an important psychological response: Your attention becomes laser-focused on the perceived threat. As a result, it’s really hard to concentrate on other stuff. That’s a good thing if there’s an actual threat; you want to be focused on the saber-toothed tiger and not daydreaming about some fantasy or something like that.

Then behaviorally, with all that energy from the fight-or-flight response we feel like we need to either fight back or run. Some animals go into a “freeze” response. And if we can’t run or fight, we might become restless, fidgety and even short-tempered with others.

At the brain level, we know that the amygdala is involved in the anxiety response. But it remains a mystery exactly how something like the perception of threat gets translated into chemical messages, psychological experiences like anxiety and fear, and shifts in attention and behavioral urges to fight or run. The brain is probably the most complex object in the known universe. Still, psychological and neuroscience researchers are working to better understand what’s happening, and that’s helped us develop some basic ideas of how it all works.

Why do some people like being scared?

That probably has more to do with a mix of learning and biology. Some people are very afraid of their fight-or-flight response. In other words, they’re afraid of the feeling of anxiety itself. You won’t find them in haunted houses or at a horror movie. Other people, however, enjoy these feelings and even find them exhilarating. They might even seek out experiences that provoke sympathetic arousal. Do you know people who love to jump out of airplanes or do other sorts of scary things that many people find risky? The degree to which people love or hate their anxiety response is on a continuum, and most people are in the middle somewhere.

How do things like horror movies and haunted houses capitalize on the science of fear?

Thanks to research and our personal experiences, we know the kinds of things that scare many humans. We know that certain types of sounds and images, especially if presented as a surprise, will provoke the fear response, that fight-or-flight response, for most people. Many of these are biologically determined. So those who write, direct and produce horror movies, and those who create haunted houses and other spooky stuff know how to take advantage of our innate, inborn fears.

In the spirit and tradition of Halloween, many people celebrate by seeking out feelings of sympathetic arousal and feeling spooked. And for most people, all the spookiness is a lot of fun. But there are groups of people who have a phobia of these kinds of situations, and what that amounts to is often a fear of their own fear response, and that’s what leads them to avoid things like Halloween. They don’t like the way they feel when they’re spooked out, when they’re anxious, when they have that fight-or-flight response.