ABSTRACT
From an evolutionary perspective, fear is viewed as a functional response promoting avoidance of threats. Thus, it is held to be easily associable with events that have provided recurrent survival threats to humankind. This evolutionary hypothesis is supported by human conditioning data, by observational learning data in rhesus monkeys, and by human genetic studies. Other lines of research have demonstrated that responses to phobic stimuli can be automatically elicited from effectively masked stimuli, and that anxiety patients have a pre-attentive bias to attend selectively to threat. Thus, fear and anxiety are partly determined by non-conscious information-processing mechanisms automatically switching attention to threatening stimuli. However, these mechanisms interact with conscious expectancies in determining various manifestations of fear and anxiety.
