![]() ![]() The cure lies in watching the panic unfold and in refusing to get involved in its seeming certainties. But we’ve been here before and we need – with infinite forbearance – to let the screaming go on a little – and ignore it entirely. But is there one really? Really really? Emotion will be screaming yes like one’s life depends on it. One side of the mind has to treat the other with a robust kindly scepticism: I know you’re sure there is a bear out there (at that party, in that newspaper article, in that office meeting). We need to erect a firm distinction between feelings and reality to grasp that an impression is not a prognosis and a fear is not a fact. These senses, that are mostly terrific guides to life, have to be seen for what they also are: profoundly unreliable instruments, capable of throwing out faulty readings and destroying our lives. ![]() We need to learn – on occasion – to distrust our senses completely. ![]() To start to dig ourselves out of the quicksand of worry, we – the anxious – need to do something that is likely to feel very artificial and probably rather patronising too. The anxious can’t do logical distinctions: they can’t arrange threats into separate boxes. The result of this bear encounter is an unconscious commitment to catastrophic generalisation the anxious fear all bears but also all dogs, rabbits, mice and squirrels, and all campsites and all sunny days, and even associated things, like trees rustling in the wind, or prairie grass, or the smell of coffee that was being made shortly before the bear showed up. There is no use casually telling this person that there aren’t any bears around at the moment or that this isn’t the season or that most bears are kind or that campers rarely encounter them: that’s easy for you to say that, you who was never woken up with a giant grizzly staring at you with incisors showing and giant paws clasped open for the kill. As a result, the anxious person’s inner alarm jammed into the on-position and has stayed stuck there ever since. It threatened to destroy everything: it was incomprehensibly mind-defyingly awful. Imagine that at a formative moment, when the anxious would have been profoundly unprepared and without the resources to cope, they had an encounter with a bear. The party where one knows no one, the speech to delegates, the tricky conversation at work… these put the whole of existence into question. Every slightly daunting challenge becomes a harbinger of the end there are no more gradations. They have – somewhere along the line – received such a very big fright that pretty much everything has now grown frightening. It is just that somewhere in their history, the mental equipment designed to distinguish logically between relative dangers has been destroyed. The quintessential calming question – ‘Is there actually anything to be scared of here?’ – can’t even enter consciousness: there’s no sense that a benign response could even be possible.Įasily terrified people aren’t stupid they may even be among the brightest. What makes matters so hard for us, the anxious, is that we are unable to maintain a distinction between what objectively deserves terror and what automatically and unthinkingly provokes terror. very useful in that it gives more detailed information on the topic of the FAE and in what situations it could be made.Every human worries on occasion, but for some of us, the suffering is on a quite different and more life-destroying scale: we are, without wishing to be ungrateful or absurd, more or less permanently anxious. it was very well planned the audience and contestants knew that the game show host knew all the answers, but they still made the FAE. The contestants and audience attributed the game show hosts ability to answer the questions to dispositional factors (his general knowledge) rather than situational factors which gave the game show host an advantage (because he knew all the answers). Results: the audience and contestants consistently rated the general knowledge of the game show host as superior.Ĭonclusion: this is a clear demonstration of FAE. After the game show, all participants were asked to rate the general knowledge of the contestants and game show hosts. If the contestant didn't give the correct answer after 30 seconds, the answer was given. The game show hosts had to make 10 questions based on their own knowledge that the contestants had to answer. 24 other participants watched the game show. ![]() Method: 18 pairs of students joined where one in each pair was allocated to the role of game show host, while the others became contestants. Aim: to see if the participants would make the FAE even when they knew that all the actors were simply playing a role. ![]()
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