Fear Of Theory

In historiography, many interesting theoretical perspectives on biography have emerged in recent years, from forensics to structure and microhistory. Biographers themselves, though, often fear the study of the genre - needlessly, as these eighteen engaging new essays demonstrate.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. In the current crisis of the capitalist world system, elites promote fear of crime and terrorism to keep and expand their privileges and control the masses. This book offers an analysis of the crisis and strategies for rebellion. This ebook is participating in an experiment and is available Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence. Users are free to disseminate and reuse the ebook. The licence does not however permit commercial exploitation or the creation of derivative works without specific permission. To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Fear is a powerful emotion and a formidable spur to action, a source of worry and – when it is manipulated – a source of injustice. Manufacturing Phobias demonstrates how economic and political elites mobilize fears of terrorism, crime, migration, invasion, and infection to twist political and social policy and advance their own agendas. The contributors to the collection, experts in criminology, law, sociology, and politics, explain how and why social phobias are created by pundits, politicians, and the media, and how they target the most vulnerable in our society. Emphasizing how social phobias reflect the interests of those with political, economic, and cultural power, this work challenges the idea that society’s anxieties are merely expressions of individual psychology. Manufacturing Phobias will be a clarion call for anyone concerned about the disturbing consequences of our culture of fear.

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is the fear of anxiety sensations which arises from beliefs that these sensations have harmful somatic, social, or psychological consequences. Over the past decade, AS has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and clinicians with more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles published. In addition, AS has been the subject of numerous symposia, papers, and posters at professional conventions. Why this growing interest? Theory and research suggest that AS plays an important role in the etiology and maintenance of many forms of psychopathology, including anxiety disorders, depression, chronic pain, and substance abuse. Bringing together experts from a variety of different areas, this volume offers the first comprehensive state-of-the-art review of AS--its conceptual foundations, assessment, causes, consequences, and treatment--and points new directions for future work. It will prove to be an invaluable resource for clinicians, researchers, students, and trainees in all mental health professions.

Using attachment theory, Maunder and Hunter provide a practical, clinically focused introduction to the influence of attachment styles on an individual s risk of disease and the effectiveness of their interactions with health care providers."

Drawing on psychology, political science, communication, and information sciences, this book explores the birth of conspiracy theories.

This paper presents a fear theory of the economy, based on the interplay between fear of rare disasters and the interest rate on safe assets. To do this, I study the macroeconomic consequences of government-administered interest rates in the neoclassical real business cycle model. When the government has the power to fix the safe real interest rate, the gap between the `sticky real safe rate' and the `neutral rate' can generate far-reaching aggregate distortions. When fear exogenously rises, the demand for safe assets rise and the neutral rate falls. If the central bank does not lower the safe rate by the same amount, savings rise leading to a decline in consumption and aggregate demand. The same mechanism works in reverse, when fear falls. Quantitatively, I show that a single fear factor can simultaneously (i) generate cross-correlations in output, labor, consumption, and investment consistent with the postwar US economy; and (ii) generates variation in equity prices, bond prices, and a large risk premium in line with the asset pricing data. Six novel insights emerge from the model: (1) actively regulating the safe interest rate (in both directions) can mitigate the fluctuations generated by fear cycles; (2) recessions will be deeper and longer when central banks accept the zero lower bound and are unwilling to use negative rates; (3) a commitment to use negative rates in recessions—even if never implemented—raises both the short- and long-run real neutral rates, and moderates the business cycle; (4) counter-cyclical fiscal policy can act as disaster insurance and be expansionary by reducing fear; (5) quantitative easing can be narrowly effective only when fear is high at the lower bound; and (6) when fear is high, especially at the lower bound, policies that boost productivity also help fight recessions.