Tag Archives: fears

Childhood Fearlessness Reaps Unknown Results in Adulthood

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Childhood fearlessness may predispose a child to later crime in adulthood.

Childhood fearlessness may predispose a child to later crime in adulthood.

Another long-term study (by Yu Gao, Ph.D., and colleagues) has come to the conclusion that childhood fearlessness predisposes a child to later crime in adulthood – and that can be determined by testing children under the age of three. Although I disagree with the study’s methodology, I agree with the premise that prompted the 20 year study – that fearlessness in children often translates into criminal behavior in adulthood.

Why does this matter? Because many of the problems we experience in adulthood have their roots in early childhood – buried in the deepest parts of our brains and psyches – beyond the reach of conscious memory. That can present a real problem when you are looking to make substantial life changes – some of those change efforts may be blocked by subconscious conditioning over which you have no conscious recollection or control.

Although the Gao study noted a possible (maybe probable) connection between early childhood fearlessness and adult criminal behavior, it posits no recommendation as to a remedy.

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Non-pharmaceutical Fear Erasure?

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Fearful memories can be rewritten.

Fearful memories can be rewritten.

Researchers at New York University have demonstrated scientifically that a specific fearful memory can be rewritten in the brain without the use of drugs – purely behaviorally. Of course, alternative practitioners like hypnotherapists and Rapid Eye Technicians have seen this over and over and are sold on the fact that fearful memories can be rewritten (in NLP it’s called “Reframing”).

Basing their theories on mouse and rat subjects, the researchers, led by Elizabeth Phelps, Ph.D., and Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., of NYU, grantees of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have demonstrated their training process on human subjects with positive results. The hope is to replace drug therapies with behavioral ones for anxiety and PTSD specifically – and perhaps others after some trials.

The research shows that there is a critical window of opportunity for change – within 6 hours of the recall of a traumatic memory. Once the “file” is open, specific behavioral techniques can be used to rewrite the memory back into the brain without the fear portion – with long-lasting results. The researchers also found that it was not necessary to recall specifics within a memory – just the emotional elements and the “gist” of the traumatic memory – in order to rewrite it. That’s the phenomenological findings of thousands of Rapid Eye Technicians, who basically tell their clients, “It’s not necessary to relive the events in order to release their energy and reframe [rewrite] those memories…”

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Sheeple?

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Is your fear useful to you?

Is your fear useful to you?

“I was just wondering if it is possible for a person to intentionally surrender his will in an attempt to avoid taking responsibility… is this evil? or maybe the person is hypnotized? How do you explain a situation where a person convinces himself that the blood of another man has been used… and will continue to be used to wash away his transgression? Meanwhile, the man in question says, “What you sow you shall reap.” How do you explain a situation where a person convinces himself that a man CAME TO DIE FOR HIM… when the man in question CURSED whoever it was that would betray him! How do you explain a situation where a man goes to explode his life… taking the life of others as well with the belief that he would get a better life?”

The short answer is that everyone is under a form of hypnosis of some description. Everyone is acting from some form of trance-installed belief and posthypnotic suggestion. The trick is to determine what those are and decide whether they are truly ‘useful’.

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Fear – It’s in the Eyes!

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“There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat. One of those signals is a look of fear,” David Zald, associate professor of psychology and a co-author of the new study, said. “We believe that the brain can detect certain cues even before we are aware of them, so that we can direct our attention to potentially threatening situations in our environment.”

amygdala2.jpgResearchers set out to determine if we become aware of fearful, neutral or happy expressions at the same speed, or if one of these expressions reaches our awareness faster than the others.

The team found that subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces. They believe a brain area called the amygdala, part of the emotions-processing limbic system, shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images.

“The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first. We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on,” Zald said.

Zald and his colleagues believe the eyes of the fearful face play a key role.

“Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing,” he said.”That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it’s only getting a fairly crude representation. That fearful eye may be something that’s relatively hardwired in there.”

“We are interested in now exploring what this means for behavior,” Yang said. “Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect our behavior and our decision making? If so, how?”

The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health. Blake and Zald are Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development investigators. Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, and Eunice Yang, doctoral student, were co-authors of the study, which appeared in the November 2007 issue of Emotion.