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My interest in various forms of reluctance, especially those related to shyness and social anxiety, always comes down to a consideration of fear and anxiety related sensations in general. Avoidance behavior is the chief outcome of concern, but the matter of what fears cause what kinds of avoidance is always an issue.

I uncovered some useful distinctions in a book on fear and anxiety, Anxiety Sensitivity: Theory, Research and Treatment of the Fear of Anxiety, by Steven Taylor and Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999.

Fundamental Fears and Common Fears

Citing Stephen Reiss, the authors proposed that there are three fundamental fears: l. fear of anxiety; 2. fear of illness, injury and death; and 3. fear of negative evaluation. These fears are to be distinguished from so called common fears. Examples of the latter include fears of harmless animals, situational fears (e.g. fear of heights, fear of enclosed spaces), and social fears (e.g., fear of public speaking, fear of eating in public).

It is said that two criteria distinguish fundamental fears from common fears. First, fundamental fears are said to be fears of stimuli that are inherently aversive, at least for most people. In comparison, common fears are not inherently aversive. Second, common fears can be logically reduced to fundamental fears.

Fundamental fears provide reason for fear a wide range of things, whereas ordinary fears do not have this characteristic

According to the authors, (see page 18) “fundamental fears may interact with specific learning experiences to increase the risk of acquiring common fears. Three types of learning appear important: traumatic conditioning experiences, observational learning and receipt of threat relevant verbal information.”

I find it especially telling that fear of negative evaluation is considered one of the three main fundamental fears since this is one with which I am very familiar and one which I find most troubling and most responsible for various kinds of specific or common kinds of social anxiety…fear of contacting others, fear of confrontation, and fear of self disclosure to others.

Fear of negative evaluation functions as a kind of negative nurturance because the avoidance that it leads to provides a kind of comfort analogous to the comfort of early parenting before the advent of adult audiences and ‘the other’ . But of course seeking the sustenance of isolation eventually sickens and the security it offers it found to be illusory.

I will have more to say about the impact of negative evaluation in future blogs on this topic. My Blog