stimulus.

After just one pairing of the shock with one of the fearrelevant stimuli, people showed fear when the snake or spider was shown without the shock, while it took more pairings of the shock and the flower, mushroom, or geometric object for fear to be aroused by these fear-irrelevant stimuli alone. People also stayed afraid of the snake or spider, while fear faded over time in response to the flower, mushroom, or geometric object.* Of course we are afraid of snakes and spiders in our current environment, so is it really evolution that explains Ohman's results? If this counterargument were true, then people should respond to other dangerous objects in our current environment, such as guns and electrical outlets, just as they do to spiders and snakes. But that is not what Ohman found. It took just as long to condition fear to guns and electrical outlets as it took to condition fear to flowers, mushrooms, and geometric objects. Guns and electrical outlets have not been around long enough for natural selection to have developed them into universal triggers.12 In his extraordinarily prescient book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin described an experiment with a snake he performed more than a hundred years ago that fits quite nicely with Ohman's recent work. "I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced."13 Darwin's experience shows how rational thought cannot prevent a fearful response to an innate fear theme, an issue to which I will return shortly. It is not certain whether any such emotion themes operate as active triggers prior to experience linking them to an emotional outcome. Remember that in Ohman's research some experience was required for the snake and spider to become fear triggers; they were not frightening on initial exposure. It took only one association with
*E. O. Wilson has discussed the fear of snakes in terms that are very consistent with what I have presented. Although he does not apply his framework specifically to emotion, it is very consistent with what I am suggesting about the emotion data base. (See Consilience, Random House, 1998, especially pages 136-40.)