Breakfast or bakery? The role of categorical ambiguity in overgeneralization of learned fear in trait anxiety.

Abstract

Pavlovian conditioning studies have shown that humans can generalize conditioned fear to novel stimuli that are categorically related to the threat cue, despite perceptual dissimilarities. The current work examined the role of trait anxiety in the generalization of fear to categorically related objects. Items from 1 category, breakfast or bakery, were paired with shock whereas items from the other category were not. Participants were then tested on ambiguous cross-classified items-those that fitted in both the threat and safe categories. No trait anxiety effect was found in generalization to novel stimuli that clearly belonged to either the threat or the safe category in either shock expectancy ratings or skin conductance. In contrast, trait anxious individuals showed a bias toward higher threat appraisal to the ambiguous cross-classified stimuli. However, this pattern was not due to trait anxious individuals being more likely to perceive ambiguous items as belonging to the threat category. Instead they appear to display a bias toward overestimation of threat when the threat level is ambiguous. The current findings indicate that threat ambiguity modulates the effect of trait anxiety on categorical fear generalization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).