Abstract

 

Survival in a complex world

The natural world presents a myriad of dangers that can threaten an organism's survival. This diversity of threats is matched by a set of universal and species-specific defensive behaviors which are often subsumed under the emotions of fear and anxiety. A major issue in the field of affective science, however, is that these emotions are often conflated and scientists fail to reflect the ecological conditions that gave rise to them. I attempt to clarify these semantic issues by describing the link between ethologically defined defensive strategies and fear. This, in turn, provides a clearer differentiation between fears, the contexts that evoke them, and how they are organized within defensive survival circuits.