Extract A
If people didn’t feel fear, they wouldn’t be able to protect themselves from legitimate threats. Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger that has been pivotal throughout human evolution, but especially in ancient times when men and women regularly faced life-or-death situations.
Today, the stakes are lower, but while public speaking, elevators, and spiders don’t present the same type of immediately dire consequences that faced early man, some individuals still develop extreme fight-flight-or-freeze responses to specific objects or scenarios.
Many people experience occasional bouts of fear or “nerves” before a flight, first date, or big game. But when someone’s fear is persistent and specific to certain threat, and impairs his or her everyday life, that person might have what’s known as a specific phobia.
Extract B
People often refer to the physiological changes that occur when a person experiences fear as the fight-or-flight response. Overall, as the name suggests, the changes prepare the animal to either fight or run.
Breathing rate increases, heart rate follows suit, peripheral blood vessels — in the skin, for instance — constrict, central blood vessels around vital organs dilate to flood them with oxygen and nutrients, and muscles are pumped with blood, ready to react.
Muscles — including those at the base of each hair — also become tighter, causing piloerection, which is colloquially called goosebumps. When a human’s hair stands on end, it makes little difference to their appearance, but for more hirsute animals, it makes them seem larger and more formidable.
Metabolically, levels of glucose in the blood spike, providing a ready store of energy if the need for action arises. Similarly, levels of calcium and white blood cells in the bloodstream see an increase.
Extract C
Survivors may have strict, authoritarian parenting styles and not express as much love or warmth toward their children. In other instances, there may be a role reversal where the adults rely on the children for support, which can be extremely stressful for the child. Brent Bezo, a doctoral student at Carleton College who spent time in Ukraine with survivors of the Holodomor genocide and their families, says these parenting styles can then be adopted by the children when they grow up and have their own offspring, passing the trauma on to the third generation.
“When children become parents, they often parent based on what their parents modelled… So the second generation grew up in this environment, and then when they had their own children, they often parented in the same way that their own parents did,” Bezo explains. “Then the third generation, the grandchildren, grew up with these strict controlling parents, in a similar environment as their own parents, even though the genocide had taken place decades and decades earlier. The impact is still passed down generation to generation.”
Extract D
His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel pang[1] to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch. That pang was intensified by the strange feeling of physical pity for her set up by her tears. But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.
He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at once that what has so long poisoned his existence and enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and think again, and take interest in other things besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey Alexandrovitch was experiencing. The agony had been strange and terrible, but now it was over; he felt that he could live again and think of something other than his wife.
[1] pang - spasm