Why do scary movies make you jump? Or snakes make you run? Margaret's got the details on why we have fears and how our body responds to scares.
Class Discussion Questions:
1) What other emotions can cause a physical reaction in your body?
2) Compare and contrast how your body reacts to fear and happiness.
Read the Script:
[Margaret] So, I'm a scaredy cat, I don't watch horror films, or go to haunted houses, and when I spot a spider, you betcha, I am heading for the hills.
But, what exactly is fear? Well, it's an unpleasant emotion when we encounter danger or sense that we might be in a dangerous position, like when someone startles you. That's fear.
The interesting thing about fear, is that it isn't just an emotional response. It's also physiological. Physiological means relating to your body's functions and processes, so with fear, we don't just feel scared, our body actually responds to it.
Let's take a look at what happens when we experience fear. Once we sense something dangerous, our amygdala goes into action. This is a small almond-shaped area in your brain. It sets off chain reactions getting your body ready for the danger. You start sweating, and your heart starts pounding, your body is getting more blood to your brain and muscles to take on the danger. At the same time, organs like your stomach slow down, no need to digest lunch when your life is at risk! Maybe you feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? That's from even the tiny muscles at the base of each hair follicle tightening. In some animals having the hair stand up makes them look bigger and ready to take on a challenge. With us humans, we just get goosebumps.
All of these reactions help us survive that scary situation. The response to fear is commonly called "fight or flight", and sometimes people add in "freeze" as another option. We end up grabbing a shoe and squashing that scary spider, that's fight, sorry spider! Running away, that's flight. Or not being able to move at all, that's freeze. Usually your brain picks one to help us get out of danger's way.
Our brain's reaction to fear happens super fast, that's why loud noises will startle us, but then another area of our brain, the hippocampus, will come into play. It's the area that decides whether our response is reasonable.
So if you enter a surprise party, yes that surprise gives you a jolt, but your hippocampus says "hey, it's just my friends, no danger here." Some people, like that feeling, they're the ones watching horror films and visiting haunted houses.
Fear can be a good thing, when it helps us to stay safe, but it can also be harmful when we're afraid of things of things that we don't need to be. When our body doesn't handle fear properly, it can lead to anxiety problems, where we're overly worried about things. Or phobias, where we're afraid of things we don't need to be afraid of.
The good news is that there are ways of overcoming the fears that we shouldn't have, so watch out spiders, I've got a shoe for you!