ABSTRACT
According to everyday experience, fear seems to be part of ideosyncratic contexts, and to take such diverse forms as to defy simple classification. Torgerson (1979) asked subjects to rate their fear of many types of situations, and subjected the ratings to factor analysis. In this way, he isolated five clusters of feared situations: separation fears, social fears, animal fears, mutilation fears, and nature fears. Similar, albeit not identical, factors have been identified in many investigations (see Ohman, Dimberg, & Ost, 1985, for a review).
