António Damásio

National Public Radio did a segment on the emotion of fear. This segment was separated into two sections: how the modern world causes us to having necessary fear and the story of the women who experiences no fear. This radio piece started off with a researcher named Roger Hart. Hart was a psychologist in the 1970s that studied children’s behavior in natural settings. He set to figure out what children do when they are alone. He began by moving to a small town in Vermont to track children’s daily activities. He began his study by documenting everywhere children went by themselves within a day’s length. He asked children to show him what the dangerous places were, the scary places, and the places they were not supposed to go. He gathered all the information from the children and put together maps that would measure the distance each child was allowed to go by themselves and the average age of the children. After analyzing these maps, he concluded that by the age of 10 these children were allowed to go anywhere within the town, without their parents becoming worried that their child would be in danger. In the 1970s there was no sense of abductions or kidnappings or stranger danger. Now fast forward to present day and parents are constantly in fear that their child is in danger. To understand the change in society, Hart went back to the small town in Vermont to study the children of the children who had studied in the 1970s. He wanted to determine if the distance in which…