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.