Implicit Fear Research Articles

Task difficulty moderates implicit fear and anger effects on effort-related cardiac response

Based on the implicit-affect-primes-effort (IAPE) model (Gendolla, 2012, 2015), the present experiment tested whether objective task difficulty moderates the previously found impact of fear and anger primes on effort-related cardiac response during an arithmetic task. We expected that fear primes would lead to stronger cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity than anger primes in an easy task, but that anger primes would lead to a stronger PEP response than fear primes in a difficult task. Results corroborated these predictions. Moreover, there was no evidence that the affect primes induced conscious feelings that could explain the observed cardiac reactivity, suggesting that the primes had the intended implicit effect on effort mobilization. The findings contribute to the accumulating evidence in support of the IAPE model, showing that objective task difficulty is a moderator of implicit affect’s influence on effort-related cardiac response.

The implicit fear of power motive is associated with practice time in elite karateka and tennis players

Competitions in sports like tennis or karate are characterized by a direct interaction of opponents with one athlete trying to dominate the other. The importance of the implicit power motive – the need to have impact on others – has previously been pointed out for elite sport performances in these interactive sports. We hypothesized that the implicit power motive is associated with practice intensity in elite tennis (Study 1) and karate (Study 2). In the two studies we assessed the implicit (hope and fear components) and explicit power motives of elite male athletes (N = 62) and found associations with athletes’ current amount of practice hours and career highs in practice hours. Only the fear component of the implicit power motive was marginally positively associated with current and maximum amount of practice hours (Study 1, tennis) and significantly positively associated with additional practice time (Study 2, karate). The results suggested that elite athletes in interactive sports are motivated to practice in order not to lose (control) in competitions.

Implicit fear and effort-related cardiac response

Based on the Implicit-Affect-Primes-Effort (IAPE) model (Gendolla, 2012, 2015), two experiments tested the impact of fear primes on effort-related cardiac response. The main dependent variable was reactivity of cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) during the performance of cognitive tasks. The IAPE model predicts that activation of implicit fear and sadness results in stronger PEP responses during task performance than activation of implicit happiness or anger. To test this, Experiment 1 exposed participants to masked facial expressions of fear, anger, or happiness while they performed a cognitive “parity task”. As expected, PEP responses in the implicit fear condition were stronger than in both the implicit anger and happiness conditions. Experiment 2 conceptually replicated the implicit fear effect and revealed, as expected, stronger PEP responses for implicit fear and sadness than implicit anger during a “mental concentration” task. The findings provide the first evidence for the systematic impact of implicit fear on effort-related cardiac response and complete the existing evidence for the IAPE model.

Rapid stress system drives chemical transfer of fear from sender to receiver.

Humans can register another person’s fear not only with their eyes and ears, but also with their nose. Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to body odors from fearful individuals elicited implicit fear in others. The odor of fearful individuals appears to have a distinctive signature that can be produced relatively rapidly, driven by a physiological mechanism that has remained unexplored in earlier research. The apocrine sweat glands in the armpit that are responsible for chemosignal production contain receptors for adrenalin. We therefore expected that the release of adrenalin through activation of the rapid stress response system (i.e., the sympathetic-adrenal medullary system) is what drives the release of fear sweat, as opposed to activation of the slower stress response system (i.e., hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis). To test this assumption, sweat was sampled while eight participants prepared for a speech. Participants had higher heart rates and produced more armpit sweat in the fast stress condition, compared to baseline and the slow stress condition. Importantly, exposure to sweat from participants in the fast stress condition induced in receivers (N = 31) a simulacrum of the state of the sender, evidenced by the emergence of a fearful facial expression (facial electromyography) and vigilant behavior (i.e., faster classification of emotional facial expressions).

Unseen Fearful Faces Influence Face Encoding: Evidence from ERPs in Hemianopic Patients

Visual threat-related signals are not only processed via a cortical geniculo-striatal pathway to the amygdala but also via a subcortical colliculo-pulvinar-amygdala pathway, which presumably mediates implicit processing of fearful stimuli. Indeed, hemianopic patients with unilateral damage to the geniculo-striatal pathway have been shown to respond faster to seen happy faces in their intact visual field when unseen fearful faces were concurrently presented in their blind field [Bertini, C., Cecere, R., & Làdavas, E. I am blind, but I "see" fear. Cortex, 49, 985-993, 2013]. This behavioral facilitation in the presence of unseen fear might reflect enhanced processing of consciously perceived faces because of early activation of the subcortical pathway for implicit fear perception, which possibly leads to a modulation of cortical activity. To test this hypothesis, we examined ERPs elicited by fearful and happy faces presented to the intact visual field of right and left hemianopic patients, whereas fearful, happy, or neutral faces were concurrently presented in their blind field. Results showed that the amplitude of the N170 elicited by seen happy faces was selectively increased when an unseen fearful face was concurrently presented in the blind field of right hemianopic patients. These results suggest that when the geniculo-striate visual pathway is lesioned, the rapid and implicit processing of threat signals can enhance facial encoding. Notably, the N170 modulation was only observed in left-lesioned patients, favoring the hypothesis that implicit subcortical processing of fearful signals can influence face encoding only when the right hemisphere is intact.

Fear reactivation prior to exposure therapy: Does it facilitate the effects of VR exposure in a randomized clinical sample?

Background and objectivesThe current study is the first to examine whether reactivation of fear memory prior to exposure therapy reduces relapse in a randomized clinical sample. MethodsIn a standardized treatment protocol combining virtual reality and in-vivo exposure, patients underwent a fear reactivation procedure using a virtual spider 10 min prior to a virtual reality (VR) exposure (reactivation group: RG, n = 15). A control group (CG, n = 17) was exposed to a virtual plant 10 min prior to the VR exposure. Outcome measures were a VR spontaneous recovery test (SRT) and in-vivo a behavioral avoidance test assessed 24 h after VR exposure. One week later an in-vivo exposure session followed. Additionally, a follow-up using psychometric assessment was conducted six months after the first session. ResultsBoth groups benefitted significantly and equally from the combined treatment, and importantly, the SRT revealed no return of fear in both groups. Furthermore, follow-up tests showed long-term treatment effects with no group differences. LimitationsDue to different study components (VR treatment and in-vivo), we were not able to determine which treatment module was mainly responsible for the long-term treatment effect. Furthermore, no direct measure of memory destabilization was possible in this study. ConclusionsOur treatment package was highly effective in reducing phobic fear up to 6 months following treatment. Explicit fear reactivation prior to exposure was not beneficial in VR exposure treatment, possibly due to a failure to induce a memory destabilization or due to an implicit fear reactivation prior to treatment in both groups.

Functional connectivity of negative emotional processing in adolescent depression

BackgroundThe subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) and its connected circuitry have been heavily implicated in emotional functioning in adolescent-onset major depressive disorder (MDD). While several recent studies have examined sgACC functional connectivity (FC) in depressed youth at rest, no studies to date have investigated sgACC FC in adolescent depression during negative emotional processing. MethodsNineteen medication-naïve adolescents with MDD and 19 matched healthy controls (HCL) performed an implicit fear facial affect recognition task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We defined seeds in bilateral sgACC and assessed FC using the psychophysiological interaction method. We also applied cognitive behavioral modeling to estimate group differences in perceptual sensitivity in this task. Finally, we correlated connectivity strength with clinical data and perceptual sensitivity. ResultsDepressed adolescents showed increased sgACC-amygdala FC and decreased sgACC-fusiform gyrus, sgACC-precuneus, sgACC-insula, and sgACC-middle frontal gyrus FC compared to HCL (p<0.05, corrected). Among the MDD, sgACC-precuneus FC negatively correlated with depression severity (p<0.05, corrected). Lastly, MDD adolescents exhibited poorer perceptual sensitivity in the task than HCL, and individual differences in perceptual sensitivity significantly correlated with sgACC FC and depression scores (p<0.05, corrected). LimitationsSubjects were clinically homogenous, possibly limiting generalizability of the findings. ConclusionsAdolescent depression is associated with biased processing of negative stimuli that may be driven by sgACC dysregulation and may possibly lead to an imbalance among intrinsic functional brain networks. This work also establishes the use of combining neuroimaging and cognitive behavioral modeling methods to investigate cognitive and neural differences between psychiatric and healthy populations.

Risk for Mania and its Relationship to Implicit and Explicit Achievement Motivation

There is evidence that bipolar disorders are associated with achievement-related cognitions such as setting high goals. A psychodynamic model, the manic defense hypothesis, postulates that a threat to fragile self-esteem triggers grandiosity and manic behaviors in vulnerable people. Vulnerability to bipolar disorders should therefore be positively associated with indicators of explicit hope of success (HS) and implicit fear of failure (FF). Using an online sample (n = 252), we tested these hypotheses using the well-validated Hypomanic Personality Scale as risk indicator for mania, the Multi-Motive Grid for achievement motivation, controlling for current and lifetime depression. Contrary to expectations, we found that vulnerability for mania was significantly and positively related to implicit HS but not to FF after controlling for depression. All measures were self-report tools. Our results contradict the Manic Defense Hypothesis, but they are in line with the idea that achievement-related cognitions are of relevance to vulnerability in bipolar disorders. This is in line with research focusing on the role of the Behavioral Activation System in relation to vulnerability for mania.

Cognitive-behavior therapy resolves implicit fear associations in generalized anxiety disorder

BackgroundCognitive schema theories postulate that anxiety disorders are associated with excessive fear associations in memory. For generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), it has been shown that patients not only exhibit negative implicit evaluations of clearly negative worry words (e.g., cancer), but also a generalization of this effect to neutral words (e.g., diagnosis). This study assessed the sensitivity of this bias, which has been interpreted as an indicator of a pathologically broadened fear structure, to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). MethodsAn Extrinsic Affective Simon task was used to measure implicit associations with idiosyncratic neutral and negative worry words in 23 GAD patients and 25 healthy controls (HC). Patients were tested before and after CBT, and half of them were additionally tested while waiting for treatment. Clinical symptoms were measured before and after treatment, and at 6-months follow-up. ResultsCBT normalized bias for neutral words, and the extent of bias reduction during treatment predicted the extent of additional symptom improvement during the 6 months following intervention. Furthermore, the amplitude of pre-treatment bias predicted the onset of CBT response, with lower bias predicting immediate symptom improvement at the end of treatment, and higher bias predicting delayed treatment effects during the 6 months follow-up. ConclusionsBiased implicit evaluation of neutral worry targets does not represent an enduring vulnerability factor for the development of GAD but is related to heightened levels of state worry. Furthermore, the normalization of this bias might be a crucial factor in the therapeutic action of CBT.

Oral contraceptive usage alters the effects of cortisol on implicit fear learning

An important feature of the human defense system comprises fear learning, which stress hormones can crucially modulate. However, stress hormones might influence men and women differently, in part because of interactions with sex hormones. In women, distinct stages of the menstrual cycle or the intake of oral contraceptives (OC) affect sex hormone levels. In this study, we used a differential fear conditioning paradigm with electrical stimulation as unconditioned stimulus (UCS) following one neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS+), but not another (CS−).To investigate implicit fear learning, participants were distracted from detecting the contingencies between CS and UCS. To address interaction effects of sex and stress hormones, 32 men, 30 women in the early follicular phase of the menstrual cycle (FO), 30 women in the luteal phase (LU), and 30 OC women received either 30mg cortisol or a placebo. In the contrast CS+ minus CS−, an interaction between cortisol administration and sex hormone status emerged in the anterior parahippocampal gyrus and the hippocampus. Cortisol reduced fear learning in men, FO, and LU women, but enhanced it in OC women. Additionally, cortisol attenuated differential amygdala activation in the entire group. These results demonstrate that OC usage substantially modifies cortisol effects on emotional learning in women, particularly in memory-related medial temporal lobe regions. Further, a high dose of cortisol reduces amygdala differentiation pointing to a lowered learning ability of the defense system under high cortisol concentrations, irrespective of current sex hormone availability.

Is “Cootie” in the Eye of the Beholder? An Experimental Attempt to Modify Implicit Associations Tied to Contamination Fears

To examine the causal link between implicit associations and fear reduction, a conditioning paradigm was used in an attempt to modify contamination-related implicit associations for individuals high in contamination fear. Individuals (N = 81) were assigned to a Positive, Neutral, or No Training condition. In the Positive training condition, individuals clicked on images of potential contaminants that were followed by images of the individual's smiling face or by an approach-related word. Positive training was hypothesized to result in decreased behavioral avoidance and emotional vulnerability ratings during subsequent behavioral avoidance tasks. In the Neutral training control condition, the images of potential contaminants were followed by an equal mix of the individual's smiling, disgusted, and fearful faces or an avoidance-related word. The No Training condition served as an additional control group. Contrary to expectations, training did not shift implicit associations, nor did it affect avoidance or emotional vulnerability ratings. These results raise questions about the most appropriate form and dosage of training for this population - we conclude with suggestions for researchers to learn from these null findings when developing new training programs.

Fairies, Mermaids, Mothers and Princesses: Sexual Difference and Gender Roles in Peter Pan

Luce Irigaray postulates a homosocial cultural order in her article “When the Goods Get Together” (1981), a cultural order of men that is threatened by the possibility of female unity or females “getting together” and disrupting the play among men. This article applies Irigaray's analysis of the homosocial order to the story of Peter Pan to expose and illuminate the ways a childhood story demonstrates the very cultural order Irigaray argues is at the heart of men's system of trade and economy. Peter Pan not only teaches children this particular male cultural order, and places an implicit fear around notions of female unity, but also as part of a larger cultural product stories like Peter Pan often reflect the reality they claim is pretend. Applying psychoanalytic critique to a cultural product, standards of gender normativity that are replicated through children's stories are laid bare.

Fairies, Mermaids, Mothers, and Princesses: Sexual Difference and Gender Roles in Peter Pan

Luce Irigaray postulates a homosocial cultural order in her article “When the Goods Get Together” (1981), a cultural order of men that is threatened by the possibility of female unity or females “getting together” and disrupting the play among men. This article applies Irigaray's analysis of the homosocial order to the story of Peter Pan to expose and illuminate the ways a childhood story demonstrates the very cultural order Irigaray argues is at the heart of men's system of trade and economy. Peter Pan not only teaches children this particular male cultural order, and places an implicit fear around notions of female unity, but also as part of a larger cultural product stories like Peter Pan often reflect the reality they claim is pretend. Applying psychoanalytic critique to a cultural product, standards of gender normativity that are replicated through children's stories are laid bare.

Decoding Unattended Fearful Faces with Whole-Brain Correlations: An Approach to Identify Condition-Dependent Large-Scale Functional Connectivity

Processing of unattended threat-related stimuli, such as fearful faces, has been previously examined using group functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) approaches. However, the identification of features of brain activity containing sufficient information to decode, or “brain-read”, unattended (implicit) fear perception remains an active research goal. Here we test the hypothesis that patterns of large-scale functional connectivity (FC) decode the emotional expression of implicitly perceived faces within single individuals using training data from separate subjects. fMRI and a blocked design were used to acquire BOLD signals during implicit (task-unrelated) presentation of fearful and neutral faces. A pattern classifier (linear kernel Support Vector Machine, or SVM) with linear filter feature selection used pair-wise FC as features to predict the emotional expression of implicitly presented faces. We plotted classification accuracy vs. number of top N selected features and observed that significantly higher than chance accuracies (between 90–100%) were achieved with 15–40 features. During fearful face presentation, the most informative and positively modulated FC was between angular gyrus and hippocampus, while the greatest overall contributing region was the thalamus, with positively modulated connections to bilateral middle temporal gyrus and insula. Other FCs that predicted fear included superior-occipital and parietal regions, cerebellum and prefrontal cortex. By comparison, patterns of spatial activity (as opposed to interactivity) were relatively uninformative in decoding implicit fear. These findings indicate that whole-brain patterns of interactivity are a sensitive and informative signature of unattended fearful emotion processing. At the same time, we demonstrate and propose a sensitive and exploratory approach for the identification of large-scale, condition-dependent FC. In contrast to model-based, group approaches, the current approach does not discount the multivariate, joint responses of multiple functional connections and is not hampered by signal loss and the need for multiple comparisons correction.

Effect of the observed pupil size on the amygdala of the beholders

Among a range of cognitive functions of the amygdala, recent studies suggest its involvement in identification of the pupil size. To further address its role, we investigated the response of the amygdala to human and cat faces with varied pupil size, taking into account the effect of the gender and subjective attractiveness ratings. Twenty-seven subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while viewing faces with large and small pupils. Large pupil faces induced increased activation in the amygdala, without interactions with either subject or stimuli gender, although no equivalent activation differences were seen for cat face stimuli. The activation differences were irrespective of the perceived attractiveness, and without explicit knowledge about the manipulation of the pupil size. These data support the idea that the amygdala is responsive not only to explicit or implicit fear, abhorrence or preference, but also to other elements that might suggest heightened vigilance of biologically relevant stimuli, which does not necessarily require subjective awareness.

Effects of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism on neural responses to facial emotion

The brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism has been associated with affective disorders, but its role in emotion processing has not been fully established. Due to the clinically heterogeneous nature of these disorders, studying the effect of genetic variation in the BDNF gene on a common attribute such as fear processing may elucidate how the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism impacts brain function. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging examine the effect of the BDNF Val66Met genotype on neural activity for fear processing. Forty healthy participants performed an implicit fear task during scanning, where subjects made gender judgments from facial images with neutral or fearful emotion. Subjects were tested for facial emotion recognition post-scan. Functional connectivity was investigated using psycho-physiological interactions. Subjects were genotyped for the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism and the measures compared between genotype groups. Met carriers showed overactivation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem and insula bilaterally for fear processing, along with reduced functional connectivity from the ACC to the left hippocampus, and impaired fear recognition ability. The results show that during fear processing, Met allele carriers show an increased neural response in regions previously implicated in mediating autonomic arousal. Further, the Met carriers show decreased functional connectivity with the hippocampus, which may reflect differential retrieval of emotional associations. Together, these effects show significant differences in the neural substrate for fear processing with genetic variation in BDNF.

Sleep Deprivation Facilitates Extinction of Implicit Fear Generalization and Physiological Response to Fear

Neuroendocrine hormones, which regulate both homeostasis and stress responses, provide homeostatic recovery and sleep suppression to brains under stress. We examined the effects of total sleep deprivation on subsequent enhancement of aversive event memory, implicit fear recognition, and fear conditioning in healthy humans. Three different recognitions (explicit event, implicit emotion, and physiological response) were assessed in two groups of 14 healthy young volunteers (sleep control and sleep deprived) with aversive (motor vehicle accident films) and nonaversive episodic memory stimuli. Both groups were tested on Day 1 of the experiment and again on Days 3 and 10; the sleep-deprived group was totally deprived of initial nocturnal sleep after the first trial on Day 1. Event recognition performances were similar in both groups throughout the study. Implicit fear recognition remained high for aversive stimuli, with generalization of implicit fear recognition occurring for nonaversive stimuli on Day 3 in the sleep control group. Physiological fear and generalized fear responses were observed for every episode, and delayed enhancement of physiological response was only observed for misidentified aversive episodes in the sleep control group on Day 3. However, in the sleep-deprived group, generalization of implicit fear recognition for nonaversive stimuli on Day 3 and all physiological and generalized fear responses on Days 3 and 10 were comprehensively extinguished. Clinically, trauma-exposed victims often experience acute insomnia, indicating that such insomnia might provide prophylactic benefits in reducing the development of posttraumatic stress disorder via extinction of the fear-magnifying effects of memory.

Generalized implicit fear associations in Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Cognitive schema theories of anxiety postulate that higher-level cognitive processes such as attention and memory are guided by underlying distorted fear associations. While numerous studies investigated these disorder-specific, biased processes, hardly any research addressed the underlying schemata themselves. In particular, no study has ever addressed implicit fear associations in Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). In addition, no study has ever experimentally investigated the clinical observation that in GAD, patients' worry processes seem to be triggered by a broad range of materials, even by neutral or positive stimuli. We used a Single Target Implicit Association Task (STIAT) to investigate implicit associations and stimulus generalization with clearly negative worry-related words (e.g., cancer, bankruptcy) and neutral words that are only indirectly related to worry topics (e.g., doctor, bank). Participants were 39 GAD patients and 23 healthy controls. In line with our expectations, both groups showed negative implicit associations with negative target words, and only GAD patients also associated neutral words with negative attributes. These results support the hypothesis that GAD patients' fear associations generalize to stimuli that are only peripherally related to the core of their worries.

Investigating the impact of sex and cortisol on implicit fear conditioning with fMRI

Fear conditioning is influenced by stress but opposing effects in males and females have often been reported. In a previous human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we observed acute effects of the stress hormone cortisol on prefrontal structures. Men showed evidence for impaired fear conditioning after cortisol treatment, while the opposite pattern was found for women. In the current experiment, we tested whether similar sex-dependent effects would occur on the neural level if contingency awareness was prevented experimentally to investigate implicit learning processes. A differential fear conditioning experiment with transcutaneous electrical stimulation as unconditioned stimulus and geometric figures as conditioned stimuli (CS) was conducted. One figure was always paired (CS+), whereas the other (CS-) was never paired with the UCS. Thirty-nine (19 female) subjects participated in this fMRI study, receiving either placebo or 30 mg cortisol (hydrocortisone) before conditioning. Dependent variables were skin conductance responses (SCRs) and neural activity (BOLD signal). In line with prior findings in unaware participants, no differential learning could be observed for the SCRs. However, a sex x cortisol interaction was detected with a reduced mean response to the CS after cortisol treatment in men, while the opposite pattern was observed in women (enhanced mean SCR under cortisol). In the contrast CS+ minus CS-, neural activity showed a sex x cortisol interaction in the insula and further trends in the hippocampus and the thalamus. In these regions, cortisol reduced the CS+/CS- differentiation in men but enhanced it in women. In contrast to these sex specific effects, differential amygdala activation was found in the placebo group but not in the cortisol group, irrespective of sex. Further, differential neural activity in the amygdala and thalamus were positively correlated with the SCRs in the placebo group only. The present study in contingency unaware participants illustrates that cortisol has in some brain regions sex specific effects on neural correlates of emotional learning. These effects might translate into a different vulnerability of the two sexes for anxiety disorders.

Playing the ‘race card’: white anxieties and the expression and repression of popular racisms in the 1997 UK election

ABSTRACT Vautier's article is a case study of a particular moment in the 1997 election campaign in the United Kingdom when a Conservative politician, Nicholas Budgen, was accused of ‘playing the race card’ during a House of Commons debate in the run-up to the May general election. Here, as in other moments when this political game is discussed, the term ‘race card’ appears in both political commentary and in academic analysis as a taken-for-granted term. Its use as an unquestioned general descriptor overlooks how these moments of scandalous politics work to replay and reinforce, albeit with contemporary adjustments, longstanding ideas of national belonging and so-called racial truths. Commonsense understandings and representations of racial difference work to sustain racialized anxieties, addressed here as white anxieties. White anxiety refers to the (often implicit and routine) fear, resentment and indignation that people can experience within white-dominated societies, such as Britain, in response to imagined displacement by those identified as racially or ethnically different. Election campaigns are important moments when issues of national identity, nation and belonging are invoked as voters are asked to think about how, and by whom, the nation should be managed. Politicians, with the complicity and the separate efforts of the media, often marshal white anxieties by reinforcing notions of difference in speeches and debates over multiculturalism, immigration and scarcity with regard to resources such as jobs, housing and health services. These themes also sustain whiteness as the naturalized cultural capital of belonging and citizenship. Election campaigns, in terms of both official and unofficial politics and media participation are discursive spaces that operate to sustain commonsense notions of racialized difference and otherness. Taken-for-granted entitlements are posited by some as under threat with Whites as potential losers of material and symbolic resources. The aim is to bring the discourses that marshal and sustain such anxieties into sharper view. The analysis of this case study illustrates racialized discourses that are relevant to a range of contexts, not least to more recent events and campaigns in British politics in which similar narrative tropes are deployed, including, for example, the frequent references to so-called bogus asylum-seekers, post-7/7 attempts to link terror to cultural difference, and the intermittent calls for further immigration limits by both the press and politicians in recent years.