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Fear is an illness of the brain. A cognitive account of a novel constructive scenario of fear

  • Anna Dąbrowska is a lecturer at the Department of Applied Linguistics in the Institute of Modern Languages of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin (Poland). Interested in psychological predicates and idioms referring to psychological states, she deals with metaphors and idioms within the perspective of cognitive linguistics.

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Published/Copyright: July 20, 2023

Abstract

Once we perceive a situation as a danger, threat, or shock, the information about a fearful stimulus is immediately sent to the amygdala, which, being a component of the limbic system, is responsible for fear and anxiety processing, and plays an important role in emotion and behaviour. As the research suggests, the message about a potentially frightening situation can reach the amygdala long before we are even consciously aware of it. Then, the amygdala is to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction, marked by our increased heart rate and respiration to prepare for action (cf. LeDoux 2007). The aim of the research is, first, to account for the most prototypical cognitive scenario of fear through the prism of Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Kövecses 1986, 2015) and supply it with this neuroscientific and psychological knowledge of fear. We learn that in addition to the most common human reactions to fear, i.e. the one of a fighter or the one of a runaway, a modern man reacts to fear by denying it as well as by displacing fear from their subconscious mind. Second, by investigating the novel metaphor FEAR IS AN ILLNESS OF THE BRAIN, we aim to propose a novel constructive cognitive scenario of fear, which helps us deal with this unwanted emotion in contemporary situations that generate fear, e.g. in the era of (post)Covid-19 pandemic (WHO 2021, July 15).

About the author

Anna Dąbrowska

Anna Dąbrowska is a lecturer at the Department of Applied Linguistics in the Institute of Modern Languages of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin (Poland). Interested in psychological predicates and idioms referring to psychological states, she deals with metaphors and idioms within the perspective of cognitive linguistics.

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Published Online: 2023-07-20
Published in Print: 2023-05-25

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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