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Description
.Fear is a basic emotional sensation and response system ("feeling") initiated by an aversion to some perceived risk or threat.

Fear also can be described as a feeling of extreme dislike towards certain conditions, objects, people, or situations such as: fear of darkness, fear of ghosts, etc. Personal fear varies extremely in degree from mild caution to extreme phobia and paranoia. Fears may be a factor within a larger social network, wherin personal fears are synergetically compounded as mass hysteria.

Fear may underlie some phenomena of behavior modification, although these phenomena can be explained without adducing fear as a factor in them. Furthermore, application of aversive stimuli is also often ineffective in producing change in the behaviour intended to be changed. Fearing objects or contexts can be learned; in animals this is being studied as fear conditioning, which depends on the emotional circuitry of the brain. It is one of the basic emotions and is linked heavily to the amygdala neurons.

Some philosophers have considered fear to be a useless emotion; other thinkers note the usefulness of fear as a warning of potentially unpleasant situations or consequences. Still others consider that fear is the fuel that feeds the ego's (as in "separating/judgmental agent") engine. Note that "fear" in the sense of "God Fearing" means "To regard with reverence and awe". Fear can also be understood to be the imagined separation from God. (OED)

Description
.Fear is a basic emotional sensation and response system ("feeling") initiated by an aversion to some perceived risk or threat.

Fear also can be described as a feeling of extreme dislike towards certain conditions, objects, people, or situations such as: fear of darkness, fear of ghosts, etc. Personal fear varies extremely in degree from mild caution to extreme phobia and paranoia. Fears may be a factor within a larger social network, wherin personal fears are synergetically compounded as mass hysteria.

Fear may underlie some phenomena of behavior modification, although these phenomena can be explained without adducing fear as a factor in them. Furthermore, application of aversive stimuli is also often ineffective in producing change in the behaviour intended to be changed. Fearing objects or contexts can be learned; in animals this is being studied as fear conditioning, which depends on the emotional circuitry of the brain. It is one of the basic emotions and is linked heavily to the amygdala neurons.

Some philosophers have considered fear to be a useless emotion; other thinkers note the usefulness of fear as a warning of potentially unpleasant situations or consequences. Still others consider that fear is the fuel that feeds the ego's (as in "separating/judgmental agent") engine. Note that "fear" in the sense of "God Fearing" means "To regard with reverence and awe". Fear can also be understood to be the imagined separation from God. (OED)