24 research outputs found
Verbal instructions override the meaning of facial expressions
Psychological research has long acknowledged that facial expressions can implicitly trigger affective
psychophysiological responses. However, whether verbal information can alter the meaning of facial
emotions and corresponding response patterns has not been tested. This study examined emotional
facial expressions as cues for instructed threat-of-shock or safety, with a focus on defensive responding.
In addition, reversal instructions were introduced to test the impact of explicit safety instructions on
fear extinction. Forty participants were instructed that they would receive unpleasant electric shocks,
for instance, when viewing happy but not angry faces. In a second block, instructions were reversed
(e.g., now angry faces cued shock). Happy, neutral, and angry faces were repeatedly presented, and
auditory startle probes were delivered in half of the trials. The defensive startle reflex was potentiated
for threat compared to safety cues. Importantly, this effect occurred regardless of whether threat
was cued by happy or angry expressions. Although the typical pattern of response habituation was
observed, defense activation to newly instructed threat cues remained significantly enhanced in the
second part of the experiment, and it was more pronounced in more socially anxious participants.
Thus, anxious individuals did not exhibit more pronounced defense activation compared to less anxious
participants, but their defense activation was more persistent
The relationship between self-reported animal fear and ERP modulation: Evidence for enhanced processing and fear of harmless invertebrates in snake- and spider-fearful individuals
The present study used ERPs to compare processing of fear-relevant (FR) animals (snakes and spiders) and non-fear-relevant (NFR) animals similar in appearance (worms and beetles). EEG was recorded from 18 undergraduate participants (10 females) as they completed two animal-viewing tasks that required simple categorization decisions. Participants were divided on a post hoc basis into low snake/spider fear and high snake/spider fear groups. Overall, FR animals were rated higher on fear and elicited a larger LPC. However, individual differences qualified these effects. Participants in the low fear group showed clear differentiation between FR and NFR animals on subjective ratings of fear and LPC modulation. In contrast, participants in the high fear group did not show such differentiation between FR and NFR animals. These findings suggest that the salience of feared-FR animals may generalize on both a behavioural and electro-cortical level to other animals of similar appearance but of a non-harmful nature
Visual search with animal fear-relevant stimuli: A tale of two procedures
The present study assessed preferential attentional processing of animal fear-relevant stimuli in two procedures, Search and Interference tasks, which have been suggested to reflect on attentional capture due to the fear-relevance of the stimuli presented. In the Search task, participants (N = 154) searched fear-relevant (i.e., snakes and spiders) and non fear-relevant (i.e., fish and birds) backgrounds to determine the presence or absence of a deviant animal from the opposite category. In the Interference task, the same participants searched for the presence or absence of a neutral target (a cat) when either a snake, spider or no distracter were embedded amongst backgrounds of other animal stimuli. Replicating previous findings, preferential attentional processing of animal fear-relevant stimuli was evident in both procedures and participants who specifically feared one animal but not the other showed enhanced preferential processing of their feared fear-relevant animal. However, across the entire sample, there was no relationship between self-reported levels of animal fear and preferential processing which may reflect on the fact that substantial preferential attentional processing of fear-relevant animals was evident in the entire sample. Also, preferential attentional processing as assessed in the two tasks was not related. Delayed disengagement from fear-relevant stimuli appeared to underlie performance in the search task but not in the interference task