Fear And Its Effect On Children

Karen Thompson, in her TedTalk, “What Fear Can Teach Us”, said, “how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.” Specifically, fear has the ability of shape humans’ behaviors and decisions. This is seen

Appeals to fear are “messages that emphasize the potential harm and danger that will befall individuals” (APA) if they fail to comply with the message. This method of achieving compliance is used widely throughout modern society, however the efficacy of appealing to fear is often questioned. Fear is the most effective motivator due to the effect of discomfort fear has on readers or viewers, the primal nature of the emotion, and when an appeal to fear is paired with a solution to avoid the threat at hand, fear can be considerably more effective at inducing compliance.

The persuasive technique of appeal to fear is prominent in the anti-meth commercials due to the fact that these commercials focus primarily on frightening situations to try and persuade the targeted audience not to try meth even once. According to Logical Self Defense, appealing to fear is used in an “attempt to induce belief or action” (9), and an example of this would be “I have a gun! Gimme the money!” (9).

Children may feel apprehensive about any changes no matter how small these may be. Children generally feel apprehensive of the unknown. Such changes may include moving home, moving into a new setting etc. The worries children have will range from being simple worries such as where the toilets are located or more complex worries such as bullying etc. If any of the worries of a child are not recognised and addressed by a practitioner then this may directly impact and affect a child’s learning and development.

“The Gift Of Fear,” a psychology book written by Gavin De Becker, is an extremely useful and informative read. It gives valuable advice about how to act upon human intuition, how to recognize threats, and defines what real fear is and it’s purpose. I found the book to be extremely interesting. This book provided me with a sense of understanding on violence and fear and I feel much better prepared when it comes to recognizing dangerous situations.

The threat component in threat appeals includes material that describes the unwanted consequences of an external threat, and the likelihood that the individual will experience these consequences. The action component is composed of instructions for an effective response to an external threat in addition to material concerning an individual’s ability to execute that response. The two components are typically presented in a problem-solution format, such that individuals are first presented with a danger, and then exposed to a means of addressing danger (Meczkowski, 2015). The drive model used in this study helps to provide a scientific explanation of threat appeals. People in the medium group exhibit the highest level of message acceptance, while those in the low and high groups will show less persuasion. A threat appeal will be effective to the extent that it produces a fear response that rises, then falls. The functional form of the relationship between fear and persuasion is best described as an inverted U-curve curve. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two threat conditions, both of which described the consequences of periodontal disease (Meczkowski, 2015). A large body of threat appeal research demonstrates that the form of the fear–persuasion relationship is linear and positive in between person’s data.

Fear is something that large amounts of people have encountered at least once at some point in their lives. It has been said to have caused a variety of outcomes, many of them being largely negative. Therefore, it is a common human response to react to fear by counteracting it with positivity and/or success. The idea people have of what fear is depends on the person. In the article “How Fear Works”, for example, fear is defined as a “chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals” (Layton 1). The website “Psychology Today” defines fear another way, calling it “a vital response to physical and emotional danger” ("Fear Paranoia”). There are several other definitions people have on the

Fear plays a role in our decision making process, the question is just how big of a role does it have? Different studies have been conducted as an attempt to answer this question, only to come to different conclusions. This research examines the effects of the recommendations in a fear-arousing communication and was conducted to try and answer the conflicting findings from past studies. This study manipulated fear by presenting different discussions regarding the dangers of tetanus, then observed whether the dear influenced their decision on whether or not to receive the vaccination.

There are many ways you can persuade someone into doing something. The best way to do that is to appeal to their emotions by using fear. Fear is the best emotional appeal because of three reasons. It scares someone into doing what’s right or what it is someone is trying to get them to do. In addition, a person would think about what they really want for their future. As well as changing their perspective of a particular thing.

I would classically condition a fearful preschooler to enjoy playing with the neighbor's dog by having the dog to play with a favorite item the child enjoys playing such as a ball. For instance, when the dog begins to play with the ball, the child would immediately begin to feel excitement because a friendly animal interacts with the child favorite item, thus making the child interact with the animal and not feel so frighten. The US will be to feel fearful when interacting with a dog; The CS will be the favorite item; the UR is enjoying, and the CR will be the dog playing with the child's favorite item. The NS will be recalling events of the favorite ball but not seeing the neighbors friendly dog playing with it.

I was shocked how accurate my test results were. At first when I was taking the quiz I thought it would be inaccurate however, it proved me wrong. The ECR-R results of being fearful, is accurate, because I don’t like change and when there is change I tend to be afraid of what will happen after the change.

Advertisers must be extremely careful when considering the use of emotional appeals in general; however, fear appeals are even more controversial. Negative emotional appeals such as the ones used in the three ad campaigns aim to create a feeling of fear or anxiety about the outcome of not using the product. In this case, fear appeals create these feelings about the outcome of texting and driving, drinking and driving, and smoking tobacco. Fear appeals risk the chance of giving the consumer so much fear that they do not focus on the solution. If an advertisement causes too much fear, “consumers’ perceptual defense [help] them block out and ignore the message (due to its threatening nature)” (Hoyer, MacInnis, and Pieters 145). Additionally, there are moral issues with fear appeals because the product, service, or idea involved must be enough to fully solve the issue presented. The delicate balance of fear appeals is tested in the following three campaigns.

Fear-triggering events can have long-lasting and significant changes on the developing child, beginning with infancy. Research shows that very young infants can learn to fear people, certain places and events. Science has also proved that young children can sense a threat in their environment, but unlike adults they do not have the physical or cognitive ability to control their psychological response nor to remove themselves from a dangerous situation or to lessen the threat. Learned fear responses may disrupt the function of the stress response system. It could make it harder for the body to react to typical everyday stress. Normal situations and circumstances can cause outcomes that are harmful to a child’s development when a fear is learned. Children do not

The experiences that the child has been going through could be interpreted as Chris’s fear of the child being an individual. Author Kermode stated that The Exorcist, as a story could be told as an exaggeration of the mother’s distress of Regan’s nearing to be a grown up (Kermode, 2003:32). The storyline of the young child turned into the distress by her abject mother. The link between the abject and the young girl of her blood, spew and urine reflects Chris’s dread of her own daughter – for her to deal with the situation, Chris must abjectify Regan.

Fear is a feeling created in a response to a perceived danger. Fear can produce pleasure, heighten awareness, be in the form of phobia, a fear of the unknown and an instinctual response to danger.