Abstract
Previous research indicates that excessive fear is a critical feature in anxiety disorders; however, recent studies suggest that disgust may also contribute to the etiology and maintenance of some anxiety disorders. It remains unclear if differences exist between these two threat-related emotions in conditioning and generalization. Evaluating different patterns of fear and disgust learning would facilitate a deeper understanding of how anxiety disorders develop. In this study, 32 college students completed threat conditioning tasks, including conditioned stimuli paired with frightening or disgusting images. Fear and disgust were divided into two randomly ordered blocks to examine differences by recording subjective US expectancy ratings and eye movements in the conditioning and generalization process. During conditioning, differing US expectancy ratings (fear vs. disgust) were found only on CS-, which may demonstrated that fear is associated with inferior discrimination learning. During the generalization test, participants exhibited greater US expectancy ratings to fear-related GS1 (generalized stimulus) and GS2 relative to disgust GS1 and GS2. Fear led to longer reaction times than disgust in both phases, and the pupil size and fixation duration for fear stimuli were larger than for disgust stimuli, suggesting that disgust generalization has a steeper gradient than fear generalization. These findings provide preliminary evidence for differences between fear- and disgust-related stimuli in conditioning and generalization, and suggest insights into treatment for anxiety and other fear- or disgust-related disorders.
Highlights
Fear conditioning provides a cognitive-behavioral model of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), the central symptom of which is fear of contamination[19,20,21]
Most previous generalization studies have focused on fear; only a few studies have addressed the importance of disgust generalization, an influential negative emotion[42,43]
The US used in many fear generalization experiments elicits both fear and disgust
Summary
Fear conditioning provides a cognitive-behavioral model of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), the central symptom of which is fear of contamination[19,20,21]. The similarities between fear and disgust make it difficult to disentangle one from the other in terms of emotion e licitation[25] Both are unpleasant emotions associated with threat and are often involved in clinical disorders, such as (OCD) and agoraphobia. Fear of animals in the fear-relevant category was found to be mediated by individual levels of disgust sensitivity; no correlation was found between disgust sensitivity and the fear of predatory a nimals[29,30] These findings suggest a disease-avoidance model of animal-related fears, and that such phobias are evolutionarily mediated by the disgust r esponse[31,32]. This accounts for a considerable number of studies targeting negative emotions in general instead of specific emotions. We hypothesized pupil enlargement would be greater for fear-related CS+, GS1, and GS2 than for disgust-related stimuli
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
