Night Or Dark,Which Intensifies The Feeling Of Fear?

Nighttime fears are normal reactions to real or imagined threats at night (Gordon, King, Gullon, Muris,&Ollendick,2007). It is described as a ’heterogeneous class of fears’, which includes fears of nightmares, shadows, monsters, noises, burglars, intruders and kidnappers (Gordon, King, Gullone, Muris,&Ollendick,2007; King, Ollendick,&Tonge,1997). In our study, nighttime fears is the phenomenon that people feel more fearful to threats during nighttime than daytime.Although there are abundant literatures about nighttime fears, lots of them only focus on nighttime fears’contents, coping strategies and so on, which neglect the factors that lead to this phenomenon and its underlying mechanism. Particularly, previous researchers ignored two very important factors,"day-night" and "light-dark", In other words, we should detect which factor is the origin of nighttime fears. In addition, more than80%information people received in daily life is visual. And some researches had been shown that lack of visual information would increase fear and anxiety. So we should explore this effect from different sensory channels.In study one,"day-night" and "light-dark" were the factors between groups, stimulus type (fear vs. neutral) was the factor within group. NeXus-10system. had been used to collect subjects’skin conductance responses and heart rates. Subjects recruited in this study were128females,22.15±1.52years old,32person for each conditions. They had been asked to press "1" key when they watched the standard stimuli (a cup) and if the deviation stimuli (fearful or neutral pictures) appeared, they shouldn’t press any key. After the task, subjects need to evaluate the fearful degree of pictures appeared in the previous task (Exp.lb). Whether the SCR, HR or subjects’fearful report scores were all showed significant differences only in the day-night condition. The results demonstrated that the "day-night", not the "light-dark" factor, is the real reason for nighttime fears.In study two, the sound materials were used to detect whether the nighttime fears was a normal effect cross different sensory channels. The oddball paradigm had been used like Exp.1, and the results found that the fear stimuli processed by auditory channel(Exp.2) showed the same effects as the visual channel (Exp.1). In other words, the nighttime fear was a normal effect between different feeling channels. Generally speaking, this study focused on two questions. One was that "Night or dark, which is the real reason for nighttime fears?" The other was whether the effect could be appeared in different feeling channels. The study benefits to perfect the concepts of nighttime fears and could better to complete theories about fear. Moreover, it provided theoretical basis for the coping strategies about the nighttime fear disorder.