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.
Fear can be a pleasurable experience such as riding a roller coaster, watching a horror movie or climbing treacherous mountains. Roller coasters use fear for pleasure by using the senses of falling and traveling at uncontrollable speeds to produce a rush of adrenaline. People use horror movies to stimulate fear which in turn creates pleasure due to the fact that the fear is in the confines of safety, typically only producing goose bumps or a slightly increased heart rate. Mountain climbing differs from the other examples because this kind of thrill seeking experience involves a definite chance of physical damage or death, thus giving the person larger doses of the sought-out fear and adrenaline.
Fear is used for heightened awareness such as fear on the battlefield or fear during a rescue attempt. Soldiers use fear on the battlefield to heighten their awareness of the dangers around them. They use that fear to protect themselves and the people around them from harm. Fear during a rescue attempt follows the same premise as the soldiers’ fear, but the difference is that a rescue attempt is a finite situation with a specific end. A fireman uses his sense of fear by heightening his senses to listen for the cry of a baby, a moan of an animal and potential breach or collapse in the structure of a building.
Fear as a medical condition such as acrophobia and arachnophobia are unrealistic fears learned in one’s life that can be remedied through professional therapy and/or medications. Acrophobia is an extreme fear of heights. My mother developed her acrophobia when she fell out of a tree as a small child, causing her an extreme amount of injury. The damage sustained from that experience grew to the point of her being unable to