Button your fears

Among the strangest phobias I have ever known about is the fear of buttons. Believe me, when I first learned about it, I tried with all my inquisitive powers to ask the ones who have known her since childhood how the person involved developed this fear but no one had been able to tell me. What could possibly have caused someone to have a fear of an accessory? And how does she deal with all her "buttoning" needs? Has she grown an utter life-long dependence on all hooks and zippers? I only have seen her once and it was back at the time when I have not yet discovered the glue for textile so I was not able to offer her this item to add to her menu of reduced options.

A life without buttons is something one never really thinks about especially at a time like this when you are supposed to be thinking about the more transcendent dimensions of your beings. But I cannot help what science news captures my interest and this time it happened to be something that appeared in the March issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. No, they have not come across the case of the button phobia but they have found out that you can learn to fear something by proxy which means that you can be afraid of something by just watching someone be afraid of that thing.

The study involved the subjects watching someone be afraid. They did this by showing the participants a video of a person who picks a blue square on the screen and then receive an electric shock. This eventually conditions the person on the video to tense up (mainly measured by the sweat they produce). As a control, they also showed one on video who chooses a yellow square and does not receive an electric shock and who did not tense up. After watching the video, the participants were told to take part in the same similar experiment and when they did see a blue square, they showed fear by getting tensed even when they were NOT given the electric shock. What they found out further is that the brain part that is usually the one being alerted when we experience something to be feared first hand — the amygdala — is also active when it witnesses others learn to fear. In other words, we can learn to fear something if we have not discovered for ourselves the reason for our fears.

This learning of fear by proxy I think saves us a lot of time in not having to think twice before we get out of real danger. One does not have to learn first hand that being around wild animals could be dangerous in order to take extra care when being around them and that even if you have the genes of Tarzan or the likes of him, it may do you (and the wildlife) good to stay away from them. However, it can significantly complicate your personality, not to mention those around you, to learn to fear many other things by proxy. Think of dolls, showers and birds. These are things that you do not normally associate with fear until the movie that had Chucky — that doll with the big cheeks — Psycho and The Birds.

Most major religions also teach fear as a virtue. That is something I thought was cognitively smart of their founders. Fear has always been proven to be a reliable enforcer of rules. Tales and other legends of people who did not fear this or that were supposed to have suffered the consequences of their daring or negligence. These legends are told over and over again through generations, conditioning people to be afraid of things that are neutral by themselves but because of the film treatment, have taken on a new meaning that causes our nerves to tremble.

But I think you can also learn NOT to fear by observing and I think it can be equally powerful. I think exposure to things that overwhelm our tendencies to be afraid — such as loving and persisting to understand things more — may be great counterweights to our pendulum nature. Maybe they take more time or maybe more mental baggage means more time is needed to overcome them.

For parents, I think, this finding is especially important. You do not need to embark on heroics to teach children to examine their fears. You just have to let them validate their own fears without you imposing your own before they do. I personally have overcome many of my fears that were so evident till I was at the end of my college life. However, choosing to be with people whose way of life was to validate most things for themselves before deciding how to act, has reversed most of those fears. I still feel the silent shade of those fears somewhere inside me but they no longer sway my life.

I still have no idea how to wrap my mind around the fear of buttons even after this study. But this seems clear, while consummate fearlessness is something that most likely will make insurance companies run away from you, extreme fearfulness could drive yourself away from your own chance to discover your own life and as the study showed, those around you who learn from you. Be careful then of what you fear, others may be watching and learning.

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