Startle reaction
We will first look at the defensive reaction, which, although it cannot be called a manifestation of fear or anxiety, is their precursor. This is a fear reaction. The studies of the startle response by Landis and Hunt are of particular importance to us because they shed light on the order of occurrence in the body of the defense reaction, anxiety and fear[118].
If a shot is suddenly heard behind a person’s back or some other unexpected and strong stimulus acts on him, the person quickly bends, throws his head sharply, blinks his eyes. All of this and more is the “startle response,” a primitive innate reaction that happens involuntarily. It is she who precedes the emotions of fear and anxiety. Landis and Hunt, in their research, elicited this response using a pistol shot and filmed to capture the person’s behavior at the moment. The most characteristic feature of the startle reaction is the flexion of the body, «which resembles the defensive behavior of a person ‘shrinking’ from the cold»[119]. With a startle reaction, a person always blinks, in addition, the neck is usually “stretched forward, a characteristic facial expression appears on the face, the shoulders rise and move forward, the arms are pressed to the body, bend at the elbows, the palms turn to the body, the fingers are compressed, the body moves forward, contract abdominal muscles, bend knees …. This basic reaction is beyond the control of man, it is universal, it is common to both blacks and whites, both children and adults, as well as primates and some higher animals. Such a reaction, if viewed from a neurological aspect, suppresses the higher nerve centers, since these centers are not able to integrate the received impulses so quickly. Thus, we can say that we are afraid before we know what threatens us.
At its core, this reaction is not fear or anxiety. “It would be better to call fright a pre-emotional response,” Landis and Hunt rightly point out. “This is an instantaneous response to an unexpected intense stimulus that requires some kind of response from the body that goes beyond the usual. It resembles a response to a dangerous situation, but it is an instantaneous transient reaction, much simpler in its organization and manifestations than the so-called «emotions»[121]. Emotions in the proper sense of the word arise after the startle reaction. Adult subjects in Landis and Hunt’s experiment expressed such secondary behavioral reactions (emotions) as curiosity, irritation and fear after being frightened. Researchers believe that these secondary behaviors are “a bridge between innate responses and socially conditioned and often intentional types of responses that have appeared in the process of learning”[122].
Another observation made in this study is also of interest: the younger the child, the less secondary behavior followed the startle response. In a child in the first months of life, fright was followed by very few secondary reactions. “Our work,” write Landis and Hunt, “shows that as the child matures, more and more secondary behavioral responses occur… the number of such reactions increases as the infant matures”[124].
The startle response as a pre-emotional response of anxiety and fear leads to many interesting conclusions. For example, Lawrence Kuby sees in this reaction an «ontogeny of anxiety.» In his opinion, the fear reaction is the first sign that there is a gap between a person and the world around him. The embryo, according to Kyuubi, cannot experience fear reactions; in this case there is no interval between stimulus and response. The baby and the startle reaction are born at the same time. For the first time, a “gap” appears between the person and his environment. The baby can already feel expectation, a shift of the event into the future, frustration. According to Kyubi, both anxiety and thinking can arise only when there is a similar «gap» between a person and the world, and first anxiety appears, and only then thinking. “Anxiety in human life connects the fear reaction and the emergence of all thought processes”[125].
According to Landis and Hunt, the startle response is one of those behaviors that Goldstein called the catastrophic response. One might think that the startle response is a primitive innate defense response, a precursor to the emotional responses of the body that later become anxiety and fear.
Footnotes
118 C. Landis and Hunt, The startle pattern (New York, 1939).
119 C. Landis and Hunt, op. cit., . 23
120 Ibid., P. 21.
121 Ibid., P. 153.
122 Ibid.
123 Ibid., P. 136.
124 Ibid., p. 141. Calling the startle reaction the word «pattern», the authors want to emphasize that this is a holistic reaction of the whole organism. It is understandable why, in the literature of the last two decades, researchers increasingly interested in isolated neurophysiological components have paid little attention to the startle response.
125 L. S. Kubie, The ontogeny of anxiety. Psycoanal. Rev. 1941, 28:1, 78–85.