false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke:

quickly morphed into a full-fledged conspiracy:

Thousands shared the picture claiming the woman, as a Muslim, was indifferent to the suffering of victims around her. #BanIslam was one hashtag circulating with the image.

There’s a reason why Hollywood makes movies like Arachnophobia and Snakes on a Plane: Most people are afraid of spiders and snakes.

When I was younger, fear came in the form of a scary movie, like The Shining or Nightmare on Elm Street

Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights

This is basically ‘scaremongering’ at every available opportunity in order to sensationalize and emotionalize the impact of a news story.

Nationwide, there are about 100 burglary-homicides every year. When you compare that to more than 18,000 gun suicides, the conclusions seem pretty obvious.

“Unprovoked attacks” are defined as incidents where an attack on a live human occurs in the shark’s natural habitat with no human provocation of the shark.

The tendency to maintain a fearful response is thought to be a result of the fact that we are evolutionarily predisposed to fear snakes, spiders, or other things that might endanger us.

amygdala responds when people exhibit fear learning through instruction

Fear can be learned through direct experience with a threat, but it can also be learned via social means such as verbal warnings or observ-ing others.

“Fear is a universal survival mechanism,”

Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University,