Fear is an unpleasant feeling of perceived risk or danger, real or not. Fear also could be described as a feeling of extreme dislike to some conditions/objects, such as: fear of darkness, fear of ghost, etc. It is one of the basic emotions (see emotion theory).
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Fear may underlie some phenomena of behavior modification, although these phenomena can be explained without adducing fear as a factor in them. Furthermore, application of aversive stimuli is also often ineffective in producing change in the behaviour intended to be changed. Fearing objects or contexts can be learned; in animals this is being studied as fear conditioning, which depends on the emotional circuitry of the brain.
Fear inside a person has degree and it's different from one person to another( sometimes could lead to phobia) and if it's not properly handled could lead to social problems. Someone in fear might loose consciousness of mind and might do stupid and dangerous acts.
Some philosophers have considered fear to be a useless emotion with uniformly bad consequences; other thinkers note the usefulness of fear as a warning of bad situations.
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Fear can be described by different terms in accordance with its relative degress. Fear covers a number of terms - terror, fright, paranoia, horror, persecution complex,
Terror refers to a pronounced state of fear, where someone becomes overwhelmed with a sense of immediate danger.
Paranoia is term to describe a psychosis of fear, related to perception of being persecuted. This perception often causes one to change their normal behaviour in radical ways, after time their behavior may become extremely compulsive.
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself" (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
"Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." (Yoda in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace)
"Fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom." (Book of Proverbs)
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. H.P. Lovecraft in the 1927 essay 'Supernatural horror in Literature'.