Annotated Bibliography

Boer, J.A. den. "Social phobia: epidemiology, recognition, and treatment." British Medical

Journal, 27 Sept. 1997, p. 796+. Health Reference Center Academic, http://link.gale

group.com/apps/doc/A19927029/HRCA?u=henrico&sid=HRCA&xid=a3dcc30c.

Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.

In this article, the author pulls together various pieces of information to write a

compilation of information, specifically focusing on treatment of social phobias. They make it

very clear that social phobias are not well studied, but does point out that 23% of young adults

have a social phobia that is so severe it is debilitating in certain social situations. The author also

says that social anxiety is “strongly associated with other anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and

affective disorders,” and that 80% of people with a social phobia meet the criteria for “another

lifetime condition” in those categories. As for managing social phobias, there are

pharmacological approaches including but not limited to serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and benzodiazepines, and non-pharmacological approaches such

as cognitive-behavioral therapy and social skills training, however that last one doesn’t seem as

promising as other managing tactics, especially in people with extreme social phobia. This article

will not be helpful as it seems too narrowly focused and just repeated information previously

gathered.

Denizet-lewis, B. (2017, October 11). Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering

From Severe Anxiety? Retrieved February 26, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/

2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-american-teenagers-than-ever-suffering-from-

severe-anxiety.html
 “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering with Severe Anxiety?” by

Benoit Denizet-Lewis from the New York Times was a rather lengthy, anecdotal article about

rising levels of anxiety in teens across America. It talked mostly about a sudden influx of

teenagers reporting debilitating anxiety that kept them home from school and out of social

engagements. It also talked a lot about how students are showing an increase in internalization,

which means that anxiety and fear are usually pressured and developed by the student and their

inner thoughts, as opposed to parents, teachers, or peers. It also stressed the correlation between

smartphones and social media and rising levels of anxiety, citing the technology as one of the

biggest ways anxiety is fueled and also avoided by teenagers. This article will be extremely

helpful in future research, as it did a lot of work with the fear-centralized anxiety, and also

discussed a phobia set aside from the anxiety, which is slightly rarer. It also uses lots of studies

will be easy to refer to.

Furedi, F. (2005, September 04). Frank Furedi: When fear leaves us paralysed. Retrieved

March 20, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/04/

hurricanekatrina.usa10

Frank Furedi is a world-renowned professor of sociology who specializes in fear and how

society and sociology feed into societal fears. Specifically, he focuses on natural disasters,

terrorist attacks, and general but significant demography changes. In this editorial for the

Guardian, Furedi writes about society in the wake of 9/11 and different natural disasters like

Hurricane Katrina. He says that 9/11 was the first day of the “century of fear” that 21st century

Americans are living in, and that the questions are not “what do you fear” but “who to fear” and

“who to blame.” Another point that he brought up in this article as well as his TED Talk was the
idea that we characterize our fears and end up materializing them. Especially with new, intense,

apocalyptic language such as “plague, epidemic, and syndrome.” At the end of his article, he

tells readers to use tragedies to stimulate life and the care that we give it instead of using them

and food for our fear to feed off of. This won’t be as helpful for researching purposes, but it’s

still usable to a degree.

Furedi, F. (Speaker). (2015, December 17). Dare to know. TEDx Talks. Podcast retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5iQNY11xH8

This TedTalk is by Professor Frank Furedi, a sociologist and commentator, and is also the

author of Power of Reading: Socrates to Twitter, the Culture of Fear, and How Fear Works:

Culture of Fear in the 21st Century amongst others. His background gives him ample credibility

to talk on the subject of fear. The interesting part of this TedTalk is that he comes at fear in

society from a father’s perspective. He says that his beginning fascination with fear started when

he started discovering different aspects of caring for a child, and that he has noticed that children

are no longer free to explore for themselves but must be under adult supervision all of the time,

which actually leads to an increased fear in those children once they grow up. Furedi says that

“fear has developed a free-floating figure” that is “a spectacle of fear in front of your eyes.” He

talks about the gap year experience and the “don’t be a hero” culture where risk is equal to

danger and there is no more ‘good risk’. Risk taking is irresponsible while also being an

inescapable element of life, leading to an increased level of fear of people in society. Love, risk,

and fear, have become physical, tangible things that are no longer emotions, but something that

people manipulate to scare us and for people to make industries on. He said that if we continue to

fuel fear by over-preparing for the unpredictable worst, we will continue to live in a culture of
fear in a world where we have to be afraid of everything and sure in nothing. This will be

helpful, because it provided real-life examples and led to some of Furedi’s other works.

Ganella, D. E., Barendse, M. E. A., Kim, J. H., & Whittle, S. (2017). Prefrontal-Amygdala

Connectivity and State Anxiety during Fear Extinction Recall in Adolescents. Frontiers

in Human Neuroscience. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517378634

/HRCA?u=henrico&sid=HRCA&xid=2ffc34c1

The study of the prefrontal amygdala connectivity and state anxiety during fear extinction

recall in adolescents was a study that focused on fear extinction recall and how they relate to

adolescent anxiety levels. This was all based off of previous research and specifically rodent

research, and this was the first time a study like this has been done. While this study was

complicated, it did report that 75% of adolescents are diagnosed with anxiety disorders, and that

over 50% of those don’t actually respond to leading treatments. The scientists in charge of this

study suggest and test that this is due to extensive brain development, remodeling, and growth. In

rodents, these deficits in fear extinction recall are “due to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex,”

which ties back to the idea of dramatic brain maturation and growth during the adolescent time

period. It was also good at breaking down the parts of the brain the study was looking at and

why, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and dorsolateral PFC, and found that adolescents had

higher trait anxiety scores and SCR during fear extinction recall than the adult comparison group

did. This study will be helpful as an actual case study that has to do with fear and its relation to

anxiety levels, as well as learning more about the brain and its functions. However, due to the

intense medical jargon and the fact that it is more so studying anxiety disorders over fear, it will

not be one of the more prominent artifacts featured in future research.

LeDoux, J. E. (2015, August 10). The Amygdala Is NOT the Brain's Fear Center. Retrieved
 March 21, 2018, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/i-got-mind-tell-

you/201508/the-amygdala-is-not-the-brains-fear-center

Joseph E. LeDoux is an American neuroscientist who studies emotion and memories, and

specifies in “brain mechanisms related to fear and anxiety.” He is known to be one of the leading

scientists to research and discover that the amygdala is not the fear center of the brain, but rather

part of a larger fear system within the brain and the body. This specific article is about just that.

In the beginning of studying fear, scientists and psychologists believed that fear originated from

the amygdala because studies showed that when the amygdala was damaged, the brain had a

harder time eliciting a fight-or-flight response. However, while this is true and people with

damaged amygdalas are less responsive to threats, it was found that they still experience fear.

This lead to more research on the subject because clearly something was off. LeDoux found that

“conscious fear … is a product of cognitive systems in the neocortex that operate in parallel with

the amygdala circuit.” This means that the amygdala does play a role in fear but does not actually

cause fear itself. Instead, in the presence of danger, the amygdala sends out higher chemical and

hormone levels than usual, and the body searches for the environmental reasons for the highly

aroused state. That information is then taken in and pulls from memory to see if it is a reason we

really need to be scared. Overall, LeDoux believes that there is no actual “fear center,” and that

instead fear is a result of biological systems sending out signals rather than one area. This article

will be especially helpful since it explains some of the more intense science behind the “fear

center” or lack thereof. It also highlighted this neuroscientist as a possible professor to refer to in

the future.

Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000, August 17). Fear memories require protein
 synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Retrieved March 22, 2018,

from http://www.nature.com/articles/35021052

This study focuses on fear memory recall, and is done by highly successful professors,

including Joseph E. LeDoux, a neuroscientist famous for studying fear, anxiety, and emotions.

Most of LeDoux’s work has contrasted previous studies and provided evidence that supports the

opposite of most existing scientific data, and this study is no different as it is contrary to popular

belief and goes against what scientists have suggested about fear recall in the past. It suggests

that new memories can be changed before they are officially part of the more stable long-term

memories, and that the incorporation of these new memories into long-term includes the

“synthesis of new proteins in neurons.” It also focuses on the lateral and basal nuclei of the

amygdala, also referred to throughout the study as the LBA, and says that letting “protein

synthesis inhibitor anusomycin into the LBA shortly after training” (the creation of new

memories), “prevents consolidation of fear memories.” This suggests that memories associated

with fear are somehow warped, which in turn leads to more fear when retrieved from memory

storage, because they can be scarier than the reality of the memory. This study also looks at how

fear memories, when recalled in the future, are also in a malleable and changeable state before

they return to long-term memory. This study helps to explain the article “The Amygdala is NOT

the Brain’s Fear Center” and the study “Prefrontal-Amygdala Connectivity and State Anxiety

during Fear Extinction Recall in Adolescents,” and will be useful for future research.

Stephens, C. (2015, November 11). The Sociology of Fear. Retrieved March 20, 2018, from

http://www.newgeography.com/content/005096-the-sociology-fear
 This particular article deals with the Chapman University Survey on American Fears.

Through this survey, data is collected about four different types of categories, including personal

fears, natural disasters, paranormal fears, and the drivers of fear behavior. In 2014, the study

shows that some of the highest American fears were walking alone at night and identity theft,

while in 2015 it showed that Americans were more afraid possible political corruption and

government letdown. This just goes to show that fears are dictated by societal events, shifts, and

changes. With college students, typical “millennium anxieties” were expressed, such as not

living up to their own potential and the fear of missing out. While in general, older adults were

more worried about man-mad disasters, technology, and the government. This study also

suggests that while society might impact out fears, out fears actually impact our voting patterns,

which then in turn impact our society, which means our fears and society are well linked

together. You can’t have societal changes without fear, and fear can’t stay alive without society

shifting. This article says that “surely, there are preventative benefits that come with healthy

skepticism and insecurity, but too much diminishes any hope for societal progress.” It’s all about

finding a healthy balance. This will be helpful because it looks to more of sociology’s role in

fear.

Strauss, N. (2016, October 06). Why We're Living in the Age of Fear. Retrieved February 22,

2018, from https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-were-living-in-the-age-

of-fear-w443554

“Why We’re Living in an Age of Fear” by Neil Strauss from the Rolling Stone was not

only useful, but extremely timely and relevant. The biggest plus was that it pulled from multiple

resources and studies for information, making it a really good diving board into the subject, and
cited multiple good places to start research. The article talked a lot about how the amygdala is

not in fact associated with fear, but instead anxiety, and suggests that fear comes from another

part of the brain entirely which is responsible for reactions to situations. It also talked a lot about

the role the media plays in stimulating fear and anxiety, and how especially over the past 50

years, fear has become more prevalent to society in response to a more continuous news source.

This article will definitely be helpful and will serve as a really good place to start some research

and find potential contacts.

Turkington, C. A., Frey, R. J., & Davidson, T. (2011). Phobias. In L. J. Fundukian (Ed.), The

Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine (4th ed., Vol. 5, pp. 3381-3384). Detroit: Gale. Retrieved

from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX1919601323/GVRL?u=henrico&sid=

GVRL&xid=97ddab01

This specific medical journal was easy to read, well organized, and detailed while still

maintaining its short, concise nature. It laid out every detail starting from the overall

demographics of the condition and ending with the treatment and prognosis. It also went through

all of the aspects of the disorder, including types, causes, symptoms, and specific key definitions

of language that is specific to the field of fears, anxieties, and phobias. The section of the journal

was strictly informational, and it had an impressive bibliography that leads to more detailed

books, works, and organizations. This article will be more than helpful and provided a lot of

preliminary background knowledge.