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Shock and Dread: What Fear Does to Humans
DAVE VERHAAGEN
“In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.”
—novelist Phillip Roth
“Only one way to keep you alive,” Rick says to the frightened, freshly bitten Hershel Greene. Rick lifts the ax and chops at Hershel’s leg, blood splattering, until he hacks it completely off below the knee, not yet knowing if that will save Hershel from the effects of the walker’s deadly bite.
No other series in comics or on television evokes powerful emotions of fear, disgust, and sadness—often at the same moment—as strongly as The Walking Dead. Never before have we seen such a magnificent case study in popular culture on what living in sustained, unrelenting fear and terror does to people. In The Walking Dead, we see how it affects decisions, relationships, and the integrity of the self.
“I’ve been starting to get afraid that it’s easier just to be afraid.”
—Beth Greene1
The Biology of Fear
Immediately after he has been bitten, we see Hershel’s eyes: pure horror and panic. In that instant, his eyes—and ears and flesh and stimulated senses—send their information to his brain’s thalamus, a mass of gray matter responsible for routing sensory information. Hershel reacts in milliseconds before he realizes what the threat actually is. That happens because his amygdala, a little almond-shaped mass of cells deep in the temporal lobe, processes sensory information and starts a behavioral response—yell, pull away, seek safety—before the information reaches his brain’s awareness centers.
The thalamus sends information by two routes. The first route, directly telegraphed to the amygdala, is for lightning-fast reactions. The second route, relayed through the cerebral cortex (the outer, wrinkled brain layer responsible for higher functions), allows the information to be processed and assigned a meaning: Does this pose a real threat? If the answer is yes, the amygdala generates the proper fight-or-flight response. This longer route allows for a smarter reaction even if the amygdala already is calling for action.
Without the amygdala, we’d have been gobbled up by saber-toothed cats long ago. With it, we had a fighting chance long enough to develop a prefrontal cortex so that we could rule the earth. Sensory information floods in from the thalamus so that the amygdala, the command center for evaluating threats,2 can scan it for danger. When the amygdala recognizes a potential threat in the environment, it triggers a series of cascading alarms that produce what we see as overt signs of fear and panic: racing heart, trembling, sweating, rapid breathing, blanching skin. These physical reactions serve the deep, essential purpose of preparing us to defend ourselves vigorously.
When it’s lit up, the amygdala also jolts a portion of the cerebral cortex responsible for the conscious sensation of fear. At this point, the fear reaction isn’t just a deeply visceral experience; it begins to take form in our consciousness. If the amygdala detects a potential threat but the frontal cortex analyzes the report and finds it lacking, it tells the amygdala to calm down.
In a world full of danger, the amygdala plays a vital role in keeping us safe, but an overactive amygdala kills our performance. We get tunnel vision, our hearing becomes too selective, and our fine motor control falls apart. With more and more stress comes worse and worse fine motor behavior—the kinds of basic skills we need to lock doors, make phone calls, or grab for a weapon—in other words, many of the very things we might need to keep us safe in those terrifying moments when the zombies are closing in.
Even worse than loss of fine motor skills, though, is the whammy high stress puts on decision making. Our ability to make good choices can fall apart under extremely stressful, frightening situations. Whereas moderate stress can compromise decision making, high stress can overwhelm us if our amygdalae hijack our brains.
One of the criticisms leveled at The Walking Dead is that the characters don’t behave consistently. Their motivations and actions seem to shift. Tyreese, the man who becomes the main caretaker of the baby Lori delivered before dying, is a deeply compassionate man. Yet at one point he leaves baby Judith and two young girls to fend for themselves.
“That’s not how normal people behave,” laments one journalist in his criticism of the show, “especially people who go out of their way to protect others. It didn’t make sense.”3
Yet it did.
Although unreliable character motivations are fair game for criticism of other stories, the lack of character stability is actually a strength of The Walking Dead. To suggest that there are ways in which normal people behave in the zombie apocalypse is to minimize the weight of the catastrophic stress they are experiencing.
Thus, Rick is a rock and a pillar of strength, able to pick up the ax in a split second and cut off Hershel’s leg in order to save him, but he hallucinates and makes shocking decisions at other times. Carol is meek and mild and trustworthy, but as we later learn, she is fully capable of murdering a child.
It’s not just that tough times call for tough decisions. It’s that high stress can fundamentally alter people’s way of acting, reacting, and even perceiving the world around them. Over the course of many long months of surviving the zombie outbreak, the humans of The Walking Dead go from rational to irrational and back. This is no Downton Abbey with clear character motivations. It’s the freaking zombie apocalypse, and even the best of these people are a mess.
To have any chance of survival in this nightmarish new world, their brains must maintain a delicate balance between the frontal cortex and the amygdale, with each part doing its share of the work, calming them when they need to be calmed and activating them when they need to be activated. Rick at times finds that balance and is able to make the right but gruesomely tough choice.
How is that possible? Because other processes are at work in his brain, too. When we become afraid, we sometimes have the ability to think more clearly about the situation. This is due partly to the effects of a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, a natural stimulant in the brain that increases neural efficiency, animating us and charging us up. It also lights up the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for making memories that last. It’s one reason we remember vivid details of alarming situations. Rick’s brain, lit up by norepinephrine, is extremely efficient, thinking clearly and analyzing possibilities and options nearly at light speed.
If the infection spreads, he’s worse than dead, Rick thinks, and scans for the ax. That leg needs to come off.
And so it does, thanks to a remarkable process that allows amazing decisions to be made in the blink of an eye.
“You walk outside, you risk your life. You take a drink of water, you risk your life. Nowadays you breathe and you risk your life. You don’t have a choice. The only thing you can choose is what you’re risking it for.”
—Hershel Greene4
The Psychology of Fear
Humans experience a range of emotions, but there are four that are the primary building blocks of the others: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. The Walking Dead allows fleeting moments of happiness—a baby found safe, a reunion, an unexpected kindness—but also offers plenty of the negative emotions—tremendous sadness and grief, righteous and unrighteous anger, and plentiful fear.
Sadness is usually the product of loss and is rooted in the past. After your dear father gets his head cut off by a sword-swinging Governor, you get sad. When a fat zombie eats your dead wife’s body, you get angry. But fear occupies a special place in our psychology. We experience it when we perceive a threat in the future, sometimes the very imminent future. Something bad may happen. A zombie may bite us. Cannibals may eat us. These things have yet to occur, but the perceived likelihood of the threat moves fear along a continuum from anxiety to panic. We feel anxious at the thought of zombies in the woods near the farm; we feel panic when they overrun the property.
Even after a dreadful thing happens to us, such as getting bitten by a zombie in a prison corridor, we still feel fear. Why? Because we fear something worse might happen. Hershel would be afraid of having his calf muscle torn out by a hungry walker, but he would be more afraid of turning into a walker himself. The anxiety of searching through the dark hallway where something bad might happen gives way to the panic of knowing that something bad already has happened that may lead to an even worse thing happening. Over the course of the event, everyone’s fear gets ratcheted up from anxiety and dread to full-blown panic.
Humans, like other mammals, have remarkably efficient biological systems that help keep us alive even in the face of serious threats. But very much unlike other mammals, humans also have a highly sophisticated prefrontal cortex that allows us to recognize what many of these threats mean for us in the long term. We realize that death is inevitable despite our best efforts to keep ourselves safe. Even before the outbreak, we live with this tension daily in which we have a biological imperative to stay alive coupled with the awareness that death will come to all of us.
Many characters on The Walking Dead wrestle with this deeper notion that death is around the corner while they also want to stay alive and hold onto reasons for living. This includes Maggie and Glenn, the young couple who found love in a hopeless place. Maybe it’s that sense of love that makes them yearn for more than just survival, more than just freedom from fear.
What Would You Do if a Zombie Bit You?
Before The Walking Dead television series debuted, I interviewed its creators and cast members. I got to be the first interviewer to ask what each would do if bitten by a zombie.5
Steven Yeun (Glenn): Probably bite other people.
Norman Reedus (Daryl): Party like it’s 1999. How hot was the zombie?
Laurie Holden (Andrea): A little baby bite or a big bite? … I could cut off part of my arm, I could be amputated, and I could still live. If I could save my life, I’d keep chopping.
Norman: I’d go see Peewee’s show on Broadway.
Laurie: You don’t have to be bitten by a zombie to see that.
Sarah Wayne Callies (Lori): Bullet. Bullet to the head.
Steven: You’ve thought about this.
Sarah: I wouldn’t want to eat my kid.
Jon Bernthal (Shane): You kind of ruined my day with that question.
Andrew Lincoln (Rick): [Laughs.]
Sarah: You’d never get bitten by a zombie.
Jon: No, man. I’d bite that sucker dead.
Robert Kirkman (comic book writer): People often ask me how I would exist in this world, and I say, “Not very well.” I would probably hang myself or jump off a building early on because I’ve written this comic and know how bad it would get. Bitten by a zombie, though? I don’t know. In the movies, everyone always kills themselves immediately. “Oh, I don’t want to turn into a zombie.” I would wonder what that’s like. Maybe it’s great! Maybe when you’re walking around as a dead guy, it’s like everyone’s a chocolate bar. So I’d get away from anyone I could hurt, and then I would go for it.
(Afterward, Jon assured me that I hadn’t really ruined his day.)
— Katrina Hill
Katrina Hill onstage with Norman Reedus (Daryl Dixon).
Maggie: I don’t want to be afraid of being alive.
Glenn: Being afraid is what has kept us alive.
Maggie: No, it’s how we kept breathing.6
Like us, they both have the biological drive to stay alive, yet they know they are going to die. Maggie doesn’t just want to breathe. She wants to live fully and to have reasons to live even in the landscape of the zombie apocalypse.
To cope with the impossible dilemma of fighting to preserve a life we know will end one day, a psychological theory called TMT (terror management theory7) suggests that we turn to bigger and more permanent concepts and ideals such as identifying with a faith system, being a member of a specific country or community, or being an artist or scientist or anything else that suffuses meaning into our lives in a way that will outlast us. In turn, we commit deeply to these ideals and punish those who challenge them. We form groups that help us survive and that share our values and our outlook on the world.
We see this all the time in The Walking Dead. Fierce tribalism and closely knit communities evolve with “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” thinking, whether it is within the prison walls, the deceptively idyllic Woodbury, or Terminus, the trap at the end of the tracks. Each of these communities develops its own unique worldview, albeit bizarre and horrifying at times.
The Governor has created a seemingly safe haven in Woodbury that promises peace and protection, but his charismatic demeanor quickly comes unglued when he feels threatened by Rick and the others. Nothing will stand between him and his right to recline in front of a bunch of heads in jars.
Later, in Terminus, the once-good Gareth (presumably a version of Chris from the comic book series), having been terrorized by a gang of violent men, has concluded that you are either the hunter or the prey, and so he persuades his entire community to turn to cannibalism as a means of survival and domination. “Join us or feed us,” he tells subsequent newcomers. Gareth and his people become so callous to the murder and consumption of their fellow humans that they talk casually about mundane things as they stand over victims they intend to slaughter by cracking their skulls with baseball bats and slitting their throats. Later, he cuts off, cooks, and eats Bob Stookey’s leg in front of the man, the way Chris treats Dale in the comics.8 He’s beyond depraved but entirely congruent and accepted within his own community.
TMT suggests that although we don’t always commit to ideals or worldviews that are morally good or lovely, we do hold strong views designed to outlast us. Whether Gareth, the Governor, and Rick realize it or not, these tribal worldviews emanate from their desires not only to stay alive but to be outlasted by something—a community, a set of ideals, an achievement, a legacy—that outlives them. They then set about to guard this precious something and punish all who would challenge it. It’s a highly sophisticated way of dealing with their ultimate fear.
In a curious study that makes this point in a clever way, the psychologist Jeff Greenberg and his colleagues9 asked district court judges to rule on a hypothetical prostitution case. The hypothesis was that the judges who were prompted ahead of time about their own mortality would punish the offenders more harshly than would those who were not because they were upholding the cultural beliefs they needed to outlast them. Sure enough, the judges who were reminded of their own mortality set bond at an average of $455 for the hookers, whereas those who hadn’t been reminded that they would die one day set an average bond of $50.
When the fear of death seeps in just below our consciousness, we do things to forestall it, such as eating healthier or exercising. Sometimes we just distract ourselves with Netflix or alcohol or some other amusement, all designed to stuff the fear back down. But when we are tapped on the shoulder about our unavoidable death, as occurs when we drive by a cemetery or hear of a celebrity’s untimely demise or read about a car bomb going off, we start to focus less on our physical bodies and more on our symbolic value, such as our accomplishments or our legacy. And—here’s where it gets weird but understandable—we also get more prejudiced and more aggressive toward those who are different from us, especially those who would dare to challenge our ideals or way of life.
The Walking Dead succeeds in large part because it depicts other humans as more terrifying than the walkers much of the time. Factions form out of necessity, and the groups—along with the worldviews within them—are zealously protected. It all serves as a way of coping with the looming death they all fear but know awaits them.
Individual Differences with Fear
Time and time again we see people like Rick react to the threats around them, whether from encroaching zombie packs or swarms of marauding humans, with fierce determination and decisive action, whereas others, such as Father Gabriel Stokes, freak out in the moment of crisis. Father Gabriel, the minster at St. Sarah’s Episcopal Church, barricades himself inside the church, refusing to let anyone in, even members of his own congregation, out of fear for his own life.10 By the time Rick’s group meets him, he’s wracked with guilt, believing he is damned to hell for this. (It probably didn’t help his guilt that one of his parishioners scrawled, “You’ll burn for this,” on the side of his church.) We keep seeing the good reverend in flight, avoiding, running, trying to dodge conflict and hardship, and it keeps causing him trouble.
Why do some people react to terrifying situations with panic or avoidance whereas others seem to respond with a remarkable cool-headedness? Like most things in psychology, the answer is complex, although not so complicated as to be incomprehensible. Several personal characteristics may make an individual more likely to panic, such as a family history of anxiety disorders, past trauma, mental rigidity, social alienation, and a shy temperament.11
An even more intriguing answer to why some people panic while others remain calm in the zombie apocalypse lies in the notion of anxiety sensitivity, a relatively fixed, largely genetic personality trait that some people have in greater abundance than others. It’s a tendency to fear the bodily sensations that often come with anxiety. The individual wrongly regards these sensations as being harmful or dangerous, which in turn makes him more fearful and anxious when he is experiencing them. This, of course, makes the symptoms worse. His accelerated heart rate and quickening breathing frighten him, and that only serves to make his heart beat faster and his breathing become quicker and shallower, which terrifies him and creates a cycle that quickly turns a little anxiety into a hot mess.
People who score high on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index are much more likely to develop panic disorder or posttraumatic stress disorder, and people with these disorders develop greater anxiety sensitivity. In other words, it’s a vicious loop and a crappy hand they were genetically dealt. It’s what makes the difference between being a Father Stokes and being a Sheriff Rick in the zombie apocalypse.
Fear is the most primal of all human emotions. It has kept us safe for millennia and gives us a fighting chance in the zombie apocalypse. It’s an imperfect emotion, however. Even though fear can cause us to fight or take flight when it is necessary, it also can make us become irrational or turn into intolerant bigots. At the core of The Walking Dead is a question that also is at the core of all humankind: Will we keep our humanity when faced with our deepest fears?
References
Gardner, D. (2009). The science of fear. New York, NY: Plume.
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (2002). A perilous leap from Becker’s theorizing to empirical science: Terror management and research. In D. Liechty (Ed.), Death and denial: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the legacy of Ernest Becker. New York, NY: Praeger.
Hill, K. (2010, October 16). AMC’s The Walking Dead cast and creators: Bitten by a zombie? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypudSnw65cw.
Kain, J. (2014, February 19). What “The Walking Dead” needs to do to survive. http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/02/19/what-the-walking-dead-needs-to-do-to-survive/.
Roth, P. J. (2001). The Dying Animal. New York, NY: Vintage.
Sheikh, J. I. (2002). Lifetime trauma history and panic disorder: Findings from the National Comorbidity Survey. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 16(6), 599–603.
Staal, M. A. (2004). Stress, cognition, and human performance: A literature review and conceptual framework. Moffett Field, CA: NASA Ames Research Center.
Taylor, S., Zvolensky, M., Cox, B., et al. (2007). Robust dimensions of anxiety sensitivity: Development and initial validation of the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3. Psychological Assessment, 19, 176–188.
Wise, J. (2011). Extreme fear: The science of your mind in danger. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Notes
1. Episode 4–10, “Inmates” (February 16, 2014).
2. Wise (2011).
3. Kain (2014).
4. Episode 4–3, “Isolation” (October 27, 2013).
5. Hill (2010).
6. Episode 4–1, “30 Days without an Accident” (October 13, 2013).
7. Greenberg et al. (2002).
8. Issue 64 (2009).
9. Greenberg et al. (2002)
10. Issue 63 (2009); episode 5–3, “Four Walls and a Roof” (October 26, 2014).
11. Staal (2004).