FIGHT – FLIGHT - FREEZE . These responses exist as parts of a unified defense system. Amygdala hijack is a term coined by Daniel Goleman. Pete Walker M.A., MFT Therapy for and. Polarization to a fight, flight, freeze or fawn response is not only the developing child's unconscious attempt to obviate. Fight Flight or Freeze. The Psychological and Physiological Realities of a Deadly Force Encounter: The Beginnings of How Not to Become a Victim in an Active Shooter.
Fight Or Flight, Or Freeze? Scientists Find Brain Circuit Behind Third Fear Response.
Whether it’s fending off a saber- tooth tiger or delivering a wedding toast, fear responses are hard- wired in our brains, compelling us either to flee from the situation or confront it head- on. But in recent years, scientists have established a third response: freezing. And a new study reveals how it’s integrated into the brain’s overall circuitry. The part of your brain most responsible for feeling afraid is the amygdala. When threatening stimuli hits the back of your eye, signals are sent straight to the amygdala, which uses its bank of conditioned responses to quickly file away the present situation into any number of folders. Prior research has shown that people with lesions on parts of their amygdalae don’t produce a fear response. Such was the famous case of S.
M., a female patient dubbed the “woman with no fear.” A severely damaged amygdala rendered her unfazed by snakes, horror films, haunted houses, and real- life knife attacks. When we encounter frightening situations, we either engage in a fight response, flight response, or freezing response. Researchers have long understood the first two, but the third has remained something of a mystery. Now a team of scientists from the University of Bristol has discovered the pathways that regulate freezing responses, and their results, they argue, could be instrumental in helping people overcome certain disorders.“Our work introduces the novel concept that the cerebellum is a promising target for therapeutic strategies to manage dysregulation of emotional states such as panic disorders and phobias,” explained Systems Neuroscience Professor Bridget Lumb in a news release. Lumb and her colleagues examined a crucial part of the cerebellum involved in freezing response, the periaqueductal grey (PAG). It sits beneath the cerebrum, along the spine, and highly regulates animals’ sense of relaxation or tenseness. When researchers investigated where these pathways led, they found themselves in a separate region, known as the pyramis.
Specifically, when innate and learnt threatening situations were at play (those being either survival modes or aversions to certain noises), the pyramis lit up. The upshot, the team found, was that the pyramis acts as a junction for a number of survival- related responses. Many of these fear responses are emotional in nature, meaning that somehow tapping into the pyramis’ regulatory abilities could lessen the severity of panic disorders, phobias, and anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly nine percent of the U. S. Stella Koutsikou, researcher in the School of Physiology and Pharmacology and the study’s first author, “that understanding the neural circuits underlying fear behavior is a fundamental step towards developing effective treatments for behavioral changes associated with emotional disorders.”Source: Koutsikou S, Crook J, Earl E, et al.
Fight – Flight – Freeze (Immobilize) – Collapse “Immobilization is a hardwired reaction, not a personal fault.” Stephen Porges. In order to understand the fight or flight or freeze response you have to understand how the two branches of the autonomic nervous system (or ANS) work in harmony.
The Journal of Physiology.
Exploring Human Freeze Responses to a Threat Stressor. Abstract. Despite the fundamental nature of tonic immobility in anxiety responses, surprisingly little empirical research has focused on the “freeze” response in humans. The present report evaluated frequency and predictors of a freeze response in the context of a biological challenge. A nonclinical sample (N = 4.
CO2/balance O2. Perceptions of immobility in the context of the challenge were reported in 1. Subjective anxiety and panic during the challenge were associated with the freeze response, as were a number of anxiety symptom dimensions. Keywords: anxiety, freeze, panic, carbon- dioxide. Background. The phrase “fight or flight” was coined by Cannon (1. This term has not only been influential in later conceptual and empirical work on anxiety and its disorders, but the phrase also has become relatively well- known in popular culture.
In the context of anxiety research, the alarm or fear response described by Barlow (2. The more contemporary notion of a true or false alarm still contains the two primary features of Cannon’s original expression, though the ordering of effects is probably best reversed; flight is the overwhelming action tendency subsequent to an alarm whereas relatively fewer instances of fight responses result from threat (Lang, 1. Part of Barlow’s (2. Specifically, freezing - - or tonic immobility - - may overwhelm other competing action tendencies. For example, when fleeing or aggressive responses are likely to be ineffective, a freeze response may take place. Similar to the flight/fight response, a freeze response is believed to have adaptive value. In the context of predatory attack, some animals will freeze or “play dead.” This response, often referred to as tonic immobility (Gallup, 1.
Ethologists have documented non- volitional freeze responses in several animal species (Arduino & Gould, 1. Kalin, Shelton, Rickman, & Davidson, 1. Freezing in the context of an attack seems counterintuitive. However, tonic immobility may be the best option when the animal perceives little immediate chance of escaping or winning a fight (Arduino & Gould, 1. Korte, Koolhaas, Wingfield, & Mc.
Ewen, 2. 00. 5). For example, tonic immobility may be useful when additional attacks are provoked by movement or when immobility may increase the chance of escaping, such as when a predator believes its prey to be dead and releases it. Despite evidence suggesting that tonic immobility may be a key facet of alarm reactions, freezing has received relatively little scientific attention in humans. One exception is the PTSD/rape literature wherein several studies have described a rape- induced paralysis that appears to share many of the features of tonic immobility (Galliano, Noble, Travis & Puechl, 1. Mezey & Taylor, 1. Scaer, 2. 00. 1; Suarez & Gallup, 1. This literature suggests that a relatively high percentage of rape victims feel paralyzed and unable to act despite no loss of consciousness during the assault (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1.
Heidt, Marx, & Forsyth, 2. Since fear, predation, contact, and restraint are common to both rape and the induction of tonic immobility in animals, it has been concluded that these phenomena are essentially isomorphic (Suarez & Gallup, 1. Given the general paucity of research on human tendencies to freeze in the context of threat, as well as the general reliance on retrospective reports in the existed literature, we sought to expand knowledge in this area by providing a laboratory- based exploration of the tendency to freeze in the context of threat. Laboratory- based biological challenges offer controlled methods for understanding biological and psychological factors that influence the generation of fear (Mc.
Nally, 1. 99. 4; Schmidt et al., 2. Zvolensky & Eifert, 2. The primary aim of the present study was to determine whether laboratory- based threat stressors can provoke freeze responses and, if so, to evaluate the frequency and predictors of these responses. Because a CO2 challenge has been found to be a potent stressor (Zvolensky & Eifert, 2. Although the challenge did not involve physical attack, participants are somewhat physically confined by a breathing apparatus attached around the head, which may simulate some of the parameters relevant to freeze in the context of predatory grasp. The second aim of the research was to determine whether anxiety- related traits or predisposing factors might predict a freeze response. There is little prior work to guide hypotheses but it was generally expected that higher levels of anxiety- relevant traits would be associated with a freeze response.
Since these responses have also been documented among some PTSD victims, we expected that PTSD symptoms might be particularly predictive of freeze reactions. Method. 1. 2. 1 Participants. Participants took part in a longitudinal, primary prevention study (see Schmidt et al., in press for additional details). Exclusion criteria for this study include age restrictions (i. Axis I diagnosis. Participants were recruited from the Columbus, OH metropolitan area school system (n = 4. Ohio State University (n = 2.
Columbus, OH community (n = 9. The sample was relatively young (age M = 1. SD = 3. 9) with the majority being female (6. The sample was also primarily white (7. African- American, 9% Asian- American, 2% Hispanic, and 3% Other.
Completion of college was the most frequently endorsed level of parental education with 3. Assessments. 1. 2. Interview Measures 1. Psychiatric diagnoses were made using structured diagnostic interviews (SCID- IP; First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Williams, 1. Interviews were conducted by advanced graduate students in clinical psychology who had received extensive training in SCID administration and scoring. A consensus method of diagnosis was used at weekly staff meetings where positive diagnostic findings were reviewed.
The typical inter- rater reliability evaluation was not conducted due to participant selection criteria at baseline (i. Axis I pathology). Family History of Anxiety Family history of anxiety disorders was assessed using a semi- structured interview that was embedded within the SCID. Similar methods of assessing family history have been used in prior studies of anxiety pathology (Plehn & Peterson, 2. Yehuda, Halligan, & Bierer, 2.
Andreasen et al., 1. Following the anxiety disorders section of the SCID, the interviewer asked participants whether they were aware of any first degree relatives that had been diagnosed and treated for anxiety disorders or were likely to have suffered from these conditions despite a lack of treatment. A score of very likely, likely, or unlikely was assigned for mother, father and any siblings. In the present report, participants received a score of 1 for any “very likely” designation.
The range of scores include (0 (negative across all family members) to 3 (positive for mother, father, and at least one sibling). Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS) The PDSS is a semi- structured interview rating scale for panic disorder (Shear et al., 1.
In the present report, only the PDSS item indexing spontaneous panic frequency during the past month was utilized since the majority of items were not appropriate for a nonclinical sample. Self- Report Measures 1. Acute Panic Inventory (API) The API is a 1. Liebowitz, Gorman, Fyer, Dillon, & Klein, 1. The API has been used extensively in panic provocation studies (Fyer et al., 1. Schmidt, Eggleston, Trakowski, & Smith, 2. Participants rate the severity of each symptom from 0 (absent) to 3 (severe).
The API includes a SUDS rating of self- reported anxiety (0 - No Anxiety, 1. Extreme Anxiety). In addition to the standard API items, several additional items were added including one that assessed freeze (e. During the procedure (or resting period), I felt that I could not move) and another that assessed flight (e. During the procedure (or resting period), I felt that I wanted to flee). Each of these items was rated on a 0 (Not at all) to 1.
Extreme) scale. 1. Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI) The ASI (Reiss et al., 1.
Schmidt & Joiner, 2. Zinbarg, Barlow, & Brown, 1.
Zvolensky, Mc. Neil, Porter, & Stewart, 2. Impact of Events Scale – Revised (IES- R) The IES- R is update of the popular IES that is used to measure intrusion and avoidance behaviors resulting from traumatic events (Weiss & Marmar, 1. Panic Attack The API was used to index panic responding. In accordance with DSM- IV panic attack criteria describing the discrete and abrupt onset of fear and symptoms, the presence of a panic attack was determined by a composite index including: (a) reporting a 4. SUDS from baseline to challenge indicating a significant increase in anxiety, and (b) reporting four or more DSM symptoms as moderate to severe during the challenge. This method as well as similar methods of operationalizing panic response has been utilized in other reports (Schmidt, Eggleston, Trakowski, & Smith, in press; Schmidt, Miller, Lerew, Woolaway- Bickel, & Fitzpatrick, 2. Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) The SIAS assesses fears of social interaction and is well validated with good psychometric properties (Mattick & Clark, 1.
Trait Anxiety (STAI) The STAI assesses state and trait anxiety (Knight, Waal- Manning, & Spears, 1. Only the trait scale, which measures general levels of anxiety, was utilized in the present study. Raw scores were used for analyses by summing responses to this scale (after reverse scoring negatively- worded items). Challenge 1. 2. 2. CO2 Challenge A 2. CO2- enriched (balance O2) biological challenge provided an index of fear responding to a novel stimulus. To control for different expectancies regarding the consequences of breathing CO2- enriched air, all participants were informed of several possible symptomatic consequences of breathing CO2- enriched air including: breathlessness, dizziness, chest pain, and tachycardia.