fear

Six GPS-tracked wild cats wandered closer to Santa Cruz, California, and surrounding towns as human activity died down under shelter-in-place orders last March.

A group of self-styled screamologists are sifting through the noisiness of nonverbal human vocalizations and finding previously undemonstrated forms of communication.

The animals adopt the emotional state of their cagemates, and the parts of the brain engaged during the process are different for pain and fear, according to a new study.

In the book’s prologue, author Daniel T. Blumstein explains his introduction to the study of fear.

See University of California, Los Angeles, animal behavior researcher Dan Blumstein explain common characteristics of vocalizations that express fearful emotions.

The primordial emotion is apt to run amok. But harnessing it can lead to responsible behavior and sound thinking.

Meet some of the people featured in the October 2020 issue of The Scientist.

Fear binds us to our human and nonhuman ancestors. Understanding the emotion can help us grapple with challenges we face today.

A study in people fails to detect differences in the brain’s response to fear or anxiety, long thought to be controlled by different neural circuits.

Those who had developed PTSD appear to be less able to suppress unwanted memories—traumatic or not—suggesting a role for the general ability to control memory recall in the disorder.

Strategies to make lab animals forget, remember, or experience false recollections probe how memory works, and may inspire treatments for neurological diseases.

The animals develop a new memory that overrides the fearful one by inhibiting the cells that encode the original 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.

In Chapter 6, author Bill Sullivan explains how irrational fears can be passed down through transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

Researchers determine the neurological mechanics underpinning a technique to extinguish fearful memories using goal-directed eye movements.

Researchers map brain activity associated with a person’s anticipation of or direct confrontation with danger.

The brain is activated differently when it’s contemplating, rather than directly facing, a threat.

Responses to compounds in human sweat may help explain why people with autism spectrum disorder tend to struggle with social cues.

Researchers unveil the neural basis of alertness in larval zebrafish.