Panic: Fight or flight in a culture of fear?

Unlike some other emotions included in this volume, panic has not been neglected or forgotten within a number of academic disciplines. Quite the contrary, panic has seemingly only become increasingly relevant. Panic comes in different shapes and sizes, has different reasons and objectives, and is also sometimes a useful response, whereas at other times being unnecessary and even undesirable. The experience of panic ranges from the ‘sudden fear’ that occurs when we realize that we have forgotten something important, like our keys or our wallet, to the panic that occurs when we are in real physical danger. In this chapter, we will look at panic from different perspectives beginning with how we might understand panic as an emotion; what sort of experiences and reactions does the sensation of panic involve, and how does it ‘feel’? Secondly, we will look at the way psychology has conceptualized and understood panic, a discipline that has had a longstanding affair with this emotion, which has resulted in both descriptions of panic but also in the detection of several ‘disorders’ tied to panic, most obviously what we now call ‘panic disorder’. Thirdly, we will move on to a more collective level by looking at mass psychology’s interest in so-called ‘crowd behaviour’ and panic. After this, we will turn to what we call ‘a sociology of panic’, where the focus is not on the individual as such, as is the case within psychology, but rather on the social environment that produces collective feelings of panic, thus trying to show how might panic be tied to society at large. Can it be a result of certain societal developments? Or can certain types of societies be described as more prone to panic? This will in turn lead us to ask question about so-called ‘moral panics’, which are tied to more general tendencies in society – what we might call specific ‘cultures of panic’, before we end with discussing why, how and where panic could be studied at different levels of social research.