Temporal Precedence of Threat Does Not Establish Absence of Control: A Causal-Control Analysis of Fear via Top-Down Reappraisal (Version 1.1)

Abstract

The observation that a threat stimulus precedes the fear response is often taken to imply that the response escapes control. This paper argues that such an inference is not logically warranted by temporal precedence alone. Drawing on structural causal models (Pearl, 2009; Spirtes et al., 2000), we apply a three-level decomposition of control—structural, effective, and admissible counterfactual—to the specific mechanism of top-down cognitive reappraisal mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex to amygdala circuit (Ochsner & Gross, 2005). We additionally propose a relational imprinting hypothesis as an alternative to object-based preparedness theory (Seligman, 1971), arguing that what evolution may imprint is not object identity but relational attributes (unpredictability, approach velocity, looming, uncontrollability) within the visuo-motor channel. Boundary analysis shows that observing relational dependence does not compel attribution to a direct object effect—a non-identifiability result inherited from the SCM literature and here applied to the fear domain. Scope explicitly stated. This paper does not prove the reality of fear nor argue for its elimination. Its scope is confined to the top-down reappraisal pathway; other regulation mechanisms (extinction, attentional shift, exposure) lie outside its formal treatment. The boundary analysis results are applications of established non-identifiability theorems to a new domain, not novel formal theorems. Companion document. A verification protocol formalizing the empirical discriminability of the relational hypothesis is published alongside this paper (see Related Works).