The natural world presents a myriad of dangers that can threaten an organism's survival. This diversity of threats is matched by a set of universal and species specific defensive behaviors which are often subsumed under the emotions of fear and anxiety. A major issue in the field of affective science, however, is that these emotions are often conflated and scientists fail to reflect the ecological conditions that gave rise to them. I attempt to clarify these semantic issues by describing the link between ethologically defined defensive strategies and fear. This in turn, provides a clearer differentiation between fears, the contexts that evoke them and how they are organized within defensive survival circuits.

自然界存在无数威胁生物的生存的危险。威胁的这种多样性与一组普遍的，针对特定物种的防御行为相匹配，这些行为通常被归入恐惧和焦虑情绪之下。然而，情感科学领域的一个主要问题是，这些情感常常被混为一谈，而科学家却无法反映出引起它们的生态条件。我试图通过描述在道德上定义的防御策略与恐惧之间的联系来阐明这些语义问题。反过来，这在恐惧，引起恐惧的环境以及在防御性生存回路中如何组织恐惧之间提供了更清晰的区分。