Second, studies using subliminal stimulus presentation methods (e.g., backward masking or continuous flash suppression) to prevent or reduce awareness of visual stimuli show that visual threats activate the amygdala and elicit body responses despite the fact that participants deny seeing the stimulus ( 21– 30). If the same circuit was involved the correlation should be strong. First, it is well established that conscious feelings of fear and anxiety are poorly correlated with behavioral and physiological responses, such as those controlled by defensive survival circuits ( 38).
That the defensive survival circuit is separate from the circuit that gives rise to the conscious experience of fear is suggested by several lines of evidence. This approach allows animal research to be relevant to the human experience of fear, but leads to much confusion about what researchers mean when they use the term “fear” ( 20, 35).
It is, in fact, common in behavioral neuroscience to construe animal and human behavior as being caused by so-called central states rather than by subjective experiences, while at the same time retaining the subjective state term ( 13, 16– 18, 34). Others, like Perusini and Fanselow ( 31), agree that danger elicits fear and fear causes behavior, but they do not treat it as a subjective experience for them, fear is a brain state that intervenes between threats and defensive behaviors. Panksepp ( 5) noted that “fear is an aversive state of mind,” the major driving force of which is a “subcortical FEAR system” ( 33). Mowrer ( 32) argued that rats freeze “by cause” of fear. Darwin ( 1), for example, called emotions like fear states of mind inherited from animals. For some, fear is a subjective state, a phenomenal experience elicited by danger. What is meant by “fear” varies among those who use it to account for behavioral and physiological responses to threats.