Four decades of research have examined the antecedents and consequences of behavioral
inhibition (BI), a temperament profile associated with heightened reactivity to sensory stimuli …

Already as infants humans are more fearful than our closest living primate relatives, the
chimpanzees. Yet heightened fearfulness is mostly considered maladaptive, as it is thought …

It has been suggested that infants' age-typical attention biases for faces and facial
expressions have an inherent connection with the parent–infant interaction. However, only a …

Background In previous studies, an attention bias for signals of fear and threat has been
related to socioemotional problems, such as anxiety symptoms, and socioemotional …

Prioritized attention to faces can be viewed as an early-developing marker of social
engagement. This behavior is closely linked with early interactions, but there has been little …

In order to address why the number of patients suffering from anxiety and depression are
seemingly exploding in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) …

Humans are not only fearful apes, but we also communicate our fear using social cues.
Social fear displays typically elicit care and assistance in the real world and the lab. But in …

Grossmann presents an exciting and interesting theory on the function of fearfulness. In this
commentary it is argued that fearfulness may be a byproduct of a larger executive …

In the fearful ape hypothesis, Grossmann argues that heightened fearfulness increases
human-unique cooperation. We suggest that this conclusion, however, may be premature. In …

While infant fearfulness, and its expression via crying, may have been adaptive in our
evolutionary history, for modern parents, crying can be challenging to respond to. We …