What Are We So Afraid of? How Early Attention Shapes Our Most Common Fears

Fear is one of our most salient emotions, and one that is shared among humans and nonhumans alike. Traditional and modern views of how we acquire fear suggest that it is learned through conditioning or observation. However, an interesting aspect of human fears is that they are not all created equal—some fears are more likely to be experienced than others. In this article, I discuss some recent developmental research that sheds new light on why we are more likely to experience certain fears over others, and how attention and learning might work together to produce some of our most common fears and anxieties.