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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

phasic fear, sustained fear, Autism, autistic children

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Psychology

Abstract

My project was designed to study how autistic children respond to uncertainty and if they respond differently than typically developing children. Psychologists have differentiated between two different types of fear- phasic fear and sustained fear. Phasic fear is fear to a specific threat. For example, if you are hiking and see a snake on the path you are afraid. However, if there is no snake you are not afraid. Sustained fear, or anxiety, is essentially fear of what could possibly happen even when there is no physical stimulus present. Going back to the hiking example, sustained fear would be fear that a snake is going to appear at anytime. The hiker is scared of something that might appear, but is not actually present. We used an experimental paradigm that has been used to study the differences in phasic and sustained fear in adults and applied it to autistic and typically developing children.

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