Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

Not all fear is equal in the brain—context matters

A human neuroimaging study reveals that brain predictors of fear experiences are distinct across contexts.

There's a long-standing assumption that the brain has the same activation patterns for all instances of fear, but a recent human imaging study shows that this may not be the case. This is important because research to date has largely ignored the subjective and emotional nature of fear. Furthermore, this study underscores the importance of testing brain signatures of clinically relevant emotional experiences across various situations or contexts.

Northeastern University scientists Yiju Wang and Ajay Satpute worked with Emory University scientist Philip Kragel to investigate the role of context in fear experiences. They found that brain predictors of fear experiences are distinct across contexts as varied as heights, spiders, or social fear. Importantly, these differences go beyond simple semantic or visual differences, suggesting that the brain encodes emotional experiences in a highly complex manner. Understanding what aspects of the fear experience the brain regions representing each subtype distinctly encode and whether other emotions also have subtypes with unique brain representations are important next steps that may shed light on how the brain regulates subjective, yet very real, experiences of fear.