Fear of commitment of self-help, Harvard psychologist Deborah DePaulo has written books such as "Singleism" on the stigmatization of single people. The use of the term "fear" or "phobia" imparts an inherent linguistic bias. It recasts specific lifestyle decisions (such as bachelorhood vs. marriage, or a conscious decision to remain childfree by choice) implicitly as generalised, irrational phobias while failing to identify, describe or address an individual's specific motives. For instance, the men's rights movement, citing high divorce rates and expensive alimony and legal costs, would speak not in terms of "fear of commitment" but of "marriage strike" to reflect their position that
Fear processing in the brain to study in a clinical setting as opposed to mechanisms that underlie long-term potentiation (LTP), in which synaptic plasticity is induced by electrical or chemical stimulation of lateral amygdala circuits. LTP is important for fear processing because it strengthens the synapses in neural circuits. These strengthened synapses are how long-term memory is developed and how fear is developed. Synaptic input can be strengthened when activity in the presynaptic neuron co-occurs with depolarization in the postsynaptic neuron. This is known as Hebbian synaptic plasticity. This hypothesis is especially appealing as an explanation for how simple associative learning, such as that taking