THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYrewarding situations and resources, such as food, sex or shelter, nega-
tive emotions evolved to avert us from harm and distress. Emotions
also ready our bodies for the action needed to obtain our goals and
desires. When confronted by an attacker in a dark alley, fear sends
blood rushing to our limbs, enhancing our ability to take flight. On
stage before a gathered crowd, adrenaline courses through our veins,
accelerating our thoughts.
Emotions also fulfil an important social function. Our facial expression,
tone of voice and body language signal to others something of what we are
Scared to death and the smell of fear
The idea that we can be “scared to death” is more than mere poetic
hyperbole. Back in 1996 researchers at the University of Southern
California, led by Jonathan Leor, accessed coroners’ records from
around the time of the huge earthquake that had struck Los Angeles at
4.31am on 17 January, 1994. The statistics were striking. On the day the
earthquake struck, twenty-four people died from heart attacks, most
of them within an hour of the first tremors. By contrast, the previous
week’s daily average was just five deaths a day – similar to other weekly
averages from the same time of year from 1991–93. Further analysis
confirmed that the extra deaths had nothing to do with exertion and
instead seemed to have been triggered by the emotional stress of
the quake. The demographics of the people who died from a heart
attack that January day, combined with the sudden drop in heart-
related deaths the following week, suggests that it was people who
were already at risk of a heart-attack who had been scared to death
by the quake. In her book Emotional Rollercoaster, Claudia Hammond
summed up the implications of this research in a nutshell: “The fight
or flight response, which usually works so well, giving us the focus and
energy we need to deal with a situation, can backfire by stopping the
heart completely.”
It also seems that fear really does have a smell. According to a
study conducted by psychologists in 2009, we can detect fear with
our noses, but it doesn’t have a perceptible odour. Alexander Prehn-
Kristensen and his collaborators bottled fear by placing cotton pads
under the arms of students waiting to give a stressful oral presenta-
tion. For comparison, they also collected sweat from cyclists. When
the two sources of odour were delivered to participants’ noses using
an adapted oxygen mask, they couldn’t consciously tell the difference
between the two. Crucially, however, the smell of fear triggered extra
activation in a swathe of brain regions associated with processing
empathy and emotion. The finding suggests novelists could well be
on to something when they write about the “stench” of fear in the air.