Paris Alston: This is GBH’s Morning Edition. It’s the first Wednesday of the month, which means it’s time for our monthly mental health series, Wake Up Well. And since October is full of plenty of frights and haunts, today we’re talking about fear. Joining us for this conversation is Ajay Satpute, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who studies the neuroscience of emotion, fear and social cognition. Ajay, good morning. Thanks so much for being here.

Ajay Satpute: Good morning. Thanks for having me here.

Alston: So Ajay, how do our minds and bodies process fear?

Satpute: Oftentimes we think that when our minds and bodies are processing fear, there’s only one way that that works, because fear might have some kind of core system or circuitry to it. And as it turns out, there’s many different ways that fear is processed by the brain and body. And it really depends on the situation and person.

Alston: And there’s the type of scare that you might get from, say, a haunted house or like a big, scary spider. But then there’s also the fear that you get when you’re in a really dangerous situation. How do those two things differ?

Satpute: Unfortunately, scientists have a very difficult time trying to study people in really dangerous situations because, of course, we’re not able to put them in those situations. But what we can do is we can examine, for instance, fear when people are watching horror movies, or fear when people are looking at stimuli that they find themselves like phobic. So spiders or fear of heights, or we can ask people to engage in public speaking. There’s a lot of fear associated with public speaking. And in each of these cases, you find a different variety of brain systems involved and different bodily responses. And I think that the thing that we would consider as being a tipping point is when that fear becomes so overwhelming that it really inhibits your ability to learn something new from the situation or have control of yourself.

Alston: I love horror films, but it’s so perplexing that we choose to experience these things that can be scary or gory or frightening. Why? Why do we do that?

Satpute: Yeah, So there are several studies on this topic now, and they found that there’s different reasons why people do this. Some people are really into thrill-seeking and they really enjoy that feeling of arousal that’s high in the body. So situations that are often fear-inducing are also the ones that create high arousal. And people who have high thrill-seeking traits are more inclined to enjoy that rather than find it aversive. Some people engage in thrill-seeking or things that would be fear evocative because they want to achieve some kind of self-control or self-mastery. Fear actually helps you learn a lot about yourself if you approach it and engage with whatever it is that’s fear evocative.

Alston: And in that sense, is fear essentially good for us?

Satpute: If it’s overwhelming, then, you know, we’d probably want to mitigate it and reduce it in our lives. But in many cases, probably the sort of — if you were to take all of the instances of fear in the world and put them in a big distribution, probably the vast majority of those instances are cases in which we can learn something in that moment, and they could be healthy and fun for us to engage in. The most well-studied way to get to overcome your fear is, is exposure. So going through circumstances that induce that fear repeatedly more often than not diminishes it. And that goes for a wide range of fears. And part of the reason is because many of our fears are based on outcomes that we think could happen, but are actually very low probability or are not actually dangerous.

Alston: Ajay, before we let you go, we ask everyone we have on as part of the series to leave us with an affirmation related to the topic. What’s yours?

Satpute: Fear, when it’s not overwhelming, is an invitation to form new memories and to learn about yourself or about the world.

Alston: Well, that is Ajay Satpute, a psychology professor at Northeastern University. Thank you so much.

Satpute: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Alston: And you can find a list of mental health resources at GBHNews.org/WakeUpWell. And if you’d like to chime in on this topic, you can text us at (617) 300-2008. You’re listening to GBH News.

There’s the type of scare that you might get from, say, a haunted house or a big spider. But then there’s also the fear that you get when you’re in a really dangerous situation.

October, with its ubiquitous spooks and scares, can be a good time to think more deeply about fear and how it affects our mental well-being.

“Oftentimes we think that when our minds and bodies are processing fear, there’s only one way that that works, because fear might have some kind of core system or circuitry to it,” said Ajay Satpute, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who studies the neuroscience of emotion, fear and social cognition. “And as it turns out, there’s many different ways that fear is processed by the brain and body. And it really depends on the situation and person.”

Different kinds of fear can be hard to research, Satpute said, because it’s not ethical for researchers to put subjects in dangerous situations.

“But what we can do is we can examine, for instance, fear when people are watching horror movies, or fear when people are looking at stimuli that they find themselves phobic — so spiders or fear of heights, or we can ask people to engage in public speaking,” Satpute said. “In each of these cases, you find a different variety of brain systems involved and different bodily responses. And I think that the thing that we would consider as being a tipping point is when that fear becomes so overwhelming that it really inhibits your ability to learn something new from the situation or have control of yourself.”

There are some people who engage in scary activities more often than others, he said, like those who like watching horror movies or engaging in extreme sports.

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“Some people are really into thrill-seeking and they really enjoy that feeling of arousal that’s high in the body,” Satpute said. “People who have high thrill-seeking traits are more inclined to enjoy that rather than find it aversive.”

Some people also seek thrills because they want to “achieve some kind of self-control or self-mastery,” he said. “Fear actually helps you learn a lot about yourself if you approach it and engage with whatever it is that’s fear evocative.”

In that sense, is fear essentially good for us?

It can be, he said, so long as it’s not overwhelming.

“If you were to take all of the instances of fear in the world and put them in a big distribution, probably the vast majority of those instances are cases in which we can learn something in that moment, and they could be healthy and fun for us to engage in,” he said.

He suggested trying to get exposure to things that scare you in a way that feels safe, controlled and supported.

“Many of our fears are based on outcomes that we think could happen, but are actually very low probability or are not actually dangerous,” he said.

Satpute left us with an affirmation: “Fear, when it’s not overwhelming, is an invitation to form new memories and to learn about yourself or about the world.”