ESSAY; Human Nature: Some Fear Everything, Even Fear Itself

By NATALIE ANGIER

New York Times

Published: March 2, 1999

Not long ago, I had another episode of a recurring nightmare: the going-back-to-the-Bronx dream. In reality, my childhood apartment building on Creston Avenue has long since burned to the ground. In my dreams, though, I must get back to it, no matter how dangerous the journey. I must walk along dark streets where batterers and murderers loiter in every doorway. I must travel on subways that invariably run in the wrong direction. And when I finally arrive, the apartment is deserted, with no lock, no lights, no furniture, no family to protect me. I'm all alone in the Bronx, and I'm terrified right out of my id. At which point, I bolt awake -- and the real nightmare begins.

You're up! my conscious mind brays. Good, good you've got a lot of work to do. Forget about the Bronx and your girlish, nameless fears. You can't lie around worrying about phantoms. You need some meat behind your emotions. And so my mind offers for my inspection that fleshiest source of anxiety: work. I worry about the assignments still to be reported, the many stories that I've started but never finished, the parts of my latest book that I must have written under the influence of a J. Peterman catalogue. I review with the crack of a dominatrix's whip every craven act of procrastination that I've engaged in for the past year, for the past lifetime. I revisit some recent writing failures -- clumsy sentences, idiotic metaphors -- and recall verbatim snippy but searingly accurate criticisms from readers.

With my curriculum vitae beaten comatose, I move on to whipping girl No. 2: my feeble personality. I natter over my self-indulgent gloominess and failure of imagination. I worry that my daughter is doomed, that she'll blame me, or, worse, that she won't even bother blaming me. And what about my husband? Why was he putting up with me and my manufactured despair? I thought about waking him to ask that question, but then I worried he'd ask himself the same thing, and, before you know it, I'd have something new to worry about, i.e., single parenthood.

Finally, I come to the apogee of angst -- that I will waste my life worrying. From the first moment of sentience, I've managed to find something to dread, something that kept me awake at night: the next day's spelling bee, the dirt under my fingernails that my teacher would surely punish me for. You see pictures of me as a little kid, and my brow is as knit as a mitten. Would it be ever thus? Was I condemned to spend my few precious decades of consciousness trapped in an Edvard Munch painting?

I'm afraid so. From what I've been able to gather through discussions with behavioral vivisectionists -- also known as psychologists -- I am fearful by nature. It's not a disease, they tell me, it's a temperamental flavor: call it Rocky Road.

My fearfulness can even be parsed. According to the reigning model of personality development -- that is, the model accepted by at least two tenured professors who are not identical twins reared apart -- one's character is constructed of some six core components, which are mixed, matched, chopped and pureed into the primordial soup we call the self. Each dimension is thought to be partly inherited, and partly formed, or deformed, by experience. The ancients knew these personality modules as the ''dispositional humors,'' giving them zesty names like ''phlegm,'' ''choler'' and ''black bile.'' The current lingo has been castrated into proper jargon, and scientists now speak of human nature as a compendium of the traits ''harm avoidance,'' ''novelty-seeking,'' ''self-directedness'' ''cooperativeness,'' ''persistence'' and ''extraversion.''

Noting that ''tendency to wring one's hands'' was not among the dirty half-dozen, I called Dr. C. Robert Cloninger of Washington University in St. Louis and asked him, ''What's the recipe for a crybaby?''

He took to the subject with unnerving cheerfulness. ''There are two aspects of personality related to fearfulness,'' he said. ''One is being high in the dimension of harm avoidance. This means that you're very sensitive to all sorts of potentially uncomfortable stimuli. You anticipate threats and pains, and you try to avoid them.''

I shifted in my chair uncomfortably.

''The other part of fearfulness is being low in self-directedness,'' he said. ''That means you don't have much self-confidence, and you tend to think of the world as a hostile place.''

Just hearing him say that made me annoyed and defensive. Was he implying that I'm hostile?

''The two often go together, as you might expect,'' he said. ''If you're sensitive to threats, it's hard to have a hopeful view of life. That negativity can end up eroding your self-esteem. On the other hand, if you are naturally high in harm avoidance, and you're raised in a supportive environment where you learn what the safe limits are, you can gain confidence and self-directedness, and avoid becoming excessively fearful.''

''That's fine if you're a kid,'' I muttered. ''But what can you do if you're a fearful adult? Can a worrywart be surgically removed?''

''It's not impossible to change,'' he said, ''but it is difficult. One thing we've learned is that temperament tends to remain stable over the course of a lifetime.''

Oh joy, I thought. So, however the depradations of time may alter my bones, heart, skin and hindquarters, I can rest assured that my inventive fretfulness will stay perky right up to the mortician's doorstep.

I decided to take a different tack and explore the positive side of negativity. I called Dr. Myron Hofer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York, who has studied the evolution of fear and anxiety, and asked him, ''What good is fear?''

''Fear, of course, was absolutely necessary to survival in our evolutionary past,'' he said. ''For our ancestors, the world was a dangerous place, and it paid to be nervous about it most of the time.

''Anxiety is probably the first emotion that an infant experiences, at the moment of birth and separation from the mother,'' he continued. ''In nearly all birds and mammals, an infant that is separated from the nest will show signs of intense anxiety, particularly by vocalizing. The only species we've seen where this doesn't happen is the rabbit. For some reason, baby rabbits don't cry.''

So that's what I need, I thought. The world's first human-rabbit xenotransplant. Oh, wait. Hugh Hefner already tried that.

''Certain aspects of the fear response make physical sense,'' Dr. Hofer continued. ''For example, consider the fact that your arm hairs stand on end when you're scared: that could be a holdover from a young mammal's response to separation, an attempt to stay warm in the absence of its mother by fluffing up its fur.''

Or take the shallow breathing and tendency toward paralysis that can accompany intense fear, he said: what better way to fool a lurking predator than to act invisible, or dead?

''A little bit of anxiety is still a good thing to have,'' Dr. Hofer continued. ''Performance artists say they need a surge of anxiety to put on a great show. But perpetual anxiety and fearfulness are another matter. They don't make sense. Many of the threats that our forebears confronted no longer exist.''

Says who? Come with me and I'll give you something to worry about. It all starts with a midnight trip -- to the Bronx.