The Fear Factor: When the Brain Decides It's Time to Scram

William James, the late 19th- through early 20th-century philosopher, once proposed that people do not fear a bear when they see it but, rather, become frightened when running from it.
One hundred years later, a new brain-imaging study proves James may have been right. Using a Pac-Man–like video game and functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) scans, scientists showed that when a fear-provoking stimulus (say, a bear) is detected in the distance, the human brain switches on circuitry that analyzes the threat level and ways to avoid the animal or harm. Should the bear move closer—increasing the threat—other, more reactive regions of the brain jump into action, triggering an immediate protective response, whether it be to fight, flee or freeze in one's tracks.

"This [duality] is evolutionarily advantageous because a system needs to be in place that evaluates and makes decisions about external stimuli and decides if it is a threat or not," says study co-author Dean Mobbs, a PhD candidate in University College London's imaging neuroscience department. "Fast responses," he adds, "are also important because in early mammals, who were smaller and weaker than the larger reptiles, a quick response in the form of fight, flight or freeze were and still are critical to the survival of the animal." Human abnormalities in these functions, he notes, could lead to anxiety and panic disorders
Mobbs and his colleagues report in Science that they devised a video game that required 14 subjects to move game pieces along a virtual grid to avoid a virtual predator. To increase the fear factor, players snagged by predators could receive a series of three slight electric shocks, a slight shock or no punishment at all.
Researchers discovered by taking fMRIs of participants' brains as they played that when the predator was a distance away, there was increased activity in areas of the brain responsible for the more sophisticated processing, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a section of the cortex (the brain's main computer) located just behind the eyebrows. As the predator moved closer, the periaqueductal gray (PAG) area of the brain, located near the brain stem, kicked into action; the PAG, which triggers the release of opioid analgesia, the body's internal painkiller, also handles more visceral reactions like the fight-or-flight response.
"With the threat of more shocks, we saw more activity in the (PAG), while the threat of less shocks increased activity in the (vmPFC)," Mobbs says. "This suggests that the more fearful the stimuli is, the more we recruit the PAG, while a threat of low salience is under the control of the vmPFC."
In an editorial accompanying the study, Stephen Maren, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, wrote that the trigger shifts may underlie an individual's subjective appraisal of fear. "Activation of the prefrontal cortex by distal, unpredictable threats might foster anxiety, whereas activation of the periaqueductal gray by proximal threats may fuel panic," he wrote. "Dysfunction in these circuits is, therefore, likely to yield a variety of chronic anxiety disorders."
Mobbs agrees that overactive PAGs (and underactive vmPFCS) may play a role in panic disorders, whereas the reverse—deficient PAGs and hyper vmPFCS—may lead to anxiety. Knowing this, he says, could "help us to understand the systems that are aberrant in such populations…. This is the first step to helping such patients."

Psychology of Leadership

Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” announced President George W. Bush, addressing the nation for the first time on September 11, 2001. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.” Bush then promised “to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” These remarks, made from Emma T. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., may not seem extraordinary, but in subtle ways they exemplify Bush’s skill as a leader. When viewed through the lens of a radical new theory of leadership, Bush’s 9/11 address contains important clues to how the president solidified his political power in his early months and years in office.

In the past, leadership scholars considered charisma, intelligence and other personality traits to be the key to effective leadership. Accordingly, these academics thought that good leaders use their inborn talents to dominate followers and tell them what to do, with the goal either of injecting them with enthusiasm and willpower that they would otherwise lack or of enforcing compliance. Such theories suggest that leaders with sufficient character and will can triumph over whatever reality they confront.
In recent years, however, a new picture of leadership has emerged, one that better accounts for leadership performance. In this alternative view, effective leaders must work to understand the values and opinions of their followers—rather than assuming absolute authority—to enable a productive dialogue with followers about what the group embodies and stands for and thus how it should act. By leadership, we mean the ability to shape what followers actually want to do, not the act of enforcing compliance using rewards and punishments.
Given that good leadership depends on constituent cooperation and support, this new psychology of leadership negates the notion that leadership is exclusively a top-down process. In fact, it suggests that to gain credibility among followers, leaders must try to position themselves among the group rather than above it. In his use of everyday language—such as “hunt down” and “those folks”—Bush portrayed himself on 9/11 as a typical American able to speak for America.
According to this new approach, no fixed set of personality traits can assure good leadership because the most desirable traits depend on the nature of the group being led. Leaders can even select the traits they want to project to followers. It is no accident, then, that Bush has often come across to Americans as a regular guy rather than as the scion of an elite East Coast Yale University dynasty.
But far from simply adopting a group’s identity, influential presidents or chief executives who employ this approach work to shape that identity for their own ends. Thus, Bush helped to resolve the mass confusion on 9/11 in a way that promoted and helped to forge a new national unity. Among other things, people wondered: Who or what was the target? New York? Washington? Capitalism? The Western world? Bush’s answer: America is under attack. By establishing this fact, he invoked a sense of a united nation that required his leadership