Non-fearful Participants Research Articles

The Effects of Hurricane Katrina on Females with a Pre-Existing Fear of Storms

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of Hurricane Katrina on those with preexisting storm fear. Participants were divided into two groups, those with a fear of storms and control participants with no reported fears of any specific stimuli. Differences were examined on measures of exposure to and distress from trauma, fear, coping self-efficacy, and demographic variables. The participants were 62 female undergraduate college students who completed an online survey examining the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Despite no differences in the overall occurrence of trauma between the two groups, storm-fearful participants reported significantly more overall distress from their exposure when compared to the non-fearful participants. Those with storm-fears also reported significantly poorer coping self-efficacy following the storm than those who were not fearful. Overall, individuals with a fear of storms reported experiencing greater psychological impact and poorer coping self-efficacy from the same degree of storm exposure.

Disgust, anxiety, and vasovagal syncope sensations: A comparison of injection-fearful and nonfearful blood donors

Although research has implicated disgust in the fainting response observed in blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia, this finding has not been consistently observed in the literature. The present study further examines the relationship between disgust and fainting symptoms among injection-fearful ( n = 108) and nonfearful ( n = 338) blood donors. Volunteers from community blood drives provided pre-donation levels of anxiety and disgust towards giving blood and completed a standardized measure of vasovagal reactions (fainting) to blood donation after giving blood. As predicted, injection-fearful participants reported significantly more pre-donation anxiety and disgust compared to nonfearful participants. Injection-fearful donors also reported experiencing more fainting symptoms during blood donation and found the donation experience more unpleasant than did nonfearful participants. Although pre-donation disgust and anxiety levels each uniquely predicted fainting symptoms among nonfearful donors, only pre-donation anxiety uniquely predicted fainting symptoms among injection-fearful donors. Implications of these findings for conceptualizing the disgust–faint relationship in BII phobia are discussed.

Never mind the spider: Late positive potentials to phobic threat at fixation are unaffected by perceptual load

Research suggests that processing of emotional stimuli may be eliminated if a concurrent task places sufficient demands on attentional resources. To test whether this holds for stimuli with strong emotional significance, pictures of spiders as well as mushrooms were presented at fixation to spider-fearful and non-fearful participants. Concurrently, perceptual load was manipulated in two levels with a peripheral letter discrimination task. Results of event-related potentials showed that, compared with non-fearful participants, spider-fearful participants showed greater late positive potentials (LPP) to spiders than mushrooms, which provides a manipulation check that spiders were emotionally meaningful to spider-fearful participants. Critically, this effect was not affected by level of perceptual load. These findings suggest that strong emotional stimuli at fixation may resist manipulations of perceptual load.

Schema Content for a Threatening Situation: Responses to Expected and Unexpected Events

Although previous research has identified the components of event-based schemas, or scripts, for threatening situations in anxious individuals, no studies have examined how scripts change when anxious individuals are faced with a deviation in the expected sequence of events. In the present study, blood fearful (n = 49) and nonfearful (n = 48) participants assigned subjective units of discomfort (SUD) ratings to the events comprising the script for getting a bleeding cut on the arm. Subsequently, they listed a series of 10 events that would occur following 1 of 2 unexpected events that interrupted the script. Results indicated that blood fearful participants assigned higher SUD ratings to scripted events than nonfearful participants. Participants in the two groups generated largely similar sequences of events that would occur after the unexpected events. However, relative to nonfearful participants, blood fearful participants listed more events characterized by negative affect. These results suggest that blood fearful individuals are able to recover from deviations from the standard script for a common but threatening situation, although their associated emotional experiences are more distressing than those of nonfearful individuals.

The relationship between fear of falling and human postural control

This study was designed to improve the understanding of how standing at elevated surface heights and the associated changes in the visual field affect human balance control. Healthy young adults stood at four different surface heights (ground, 0.8, 1.6 and 3.2 m) under three different visual conditions (eyes open, eyes closed and eyes open with peripheral vision occluded). Mean position, Mean Power Frequency (MPF) and Root Mean Square (RMS) of centre of pressure (COP) displacements were calculated from 60 s standing trials, and psychosocial and physiological measures of fear and anxiety were also collected. When standing at a height of 3.2 m, 10 of 36 participants reported an increase in anxiety and a robust fear response while the remaining 26 participants experienced only an increase in anxiety and no fear response. A between subjects analysis of the effect of surface height on postural control revealed that fearful and non-fearful participants adopted different postural control strategies with increased heights. Non-fearful participants demonstrated a postural response characterized by increased MPF and decreased RMS of COP displacements with increasing heights. In contrast, fearful participants demonstrated both increasing MPF and RMS of COP displacements with increasing heights. These findings demonstrate, for the first time, a direct relationship between fear of falling and the strategies used for human postural control.

Fear relevancy, strategy use, and probabilistic learning of cue-outcome associations

The goal of this study was to determine how the fear relevancy of outcomes during probabilistic classification learning affects behavior and strategy use. Novel variants of the "weather prediction" task were created, in which cue cards predicted either looming fearful or neutral outcomes in a between-groups design. Strategy use was examined by goodness-of-fit estimates of response patterns across trial blocks to mathematical models of simple, complex, and nonidentifiable strategies. Participants in the emotional condition who were fearful of the outcomes had greater skin conductance responses compared with controls and performed worse, used suboptimal strategies, and had less insight into the predictive cue features during initial learning. In contrast, nonfearful participants in the emotional condition used more optimal strategies than the other groups by the end of the two training days. Results have implications for understanding how individual differences in fear relevancy alter the impact of emotion on feedback-based learning.

Fear, but not fear-relevance, modulates reaction times in visual search with animal distractors

The research aimed at examining attentional selectivity in a visual search paradigm using pictures of animals that have provided a recurrent threat in an evolutionary perspective (i.e., snakes and spiders) and pictures of animals that have supposedly posed no such threat (i.e., cats and fish). Experiment 1 showed no advantage of fear-relevant stimuli over non-fear-relevant animal stimuli. However, an attentional capture seemed to emerge as a delay in the disengagement of attention, specifically when there was a massive presentation of fear-relevant stimuli in the array. The results from Experiment 2, where participants were selected based specifically on their fear of either snakes or spiders (but not both), showed a preferential processing of the congruent feared stimulus, when compared with non-fearful participants, which strengthens the notion that fear significance may be an important factor drawing attention to a particular spatial location.

Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Spiders: Sensitivity to Treatment and Predictive Value for Generalization of Treatment Effects

This study tested whether high spider fearful individuals’ implicit and explicit attitudes toward spiders are sensitive to exposure treatment, and whether post-treatment implicit and/or explicit attitudes are related to the generalization of treatment effects. Self-reported explicit and implicit attitudes (indexed with a pictorial Extrinsic Affective Simon Task) were assessed in high spider fearful, treatment-seeking individuals (n = 60) before and after a one-session exposure in vivo treatment and at 2-month follow-up. A group of non-fearful participants (n = 30) completed the same assessments once. Results show that implicit attitudes did not change following treatment over and above test–retest effects. In contrast, explicit attitudes did change favorably following treatment, but negative explicit attitudes at post-treatment were associated with less pronounced overt approach behavior at follow-up. These findings support the idea that residual negative explicit attitudes interfere with the generalization of treatment effects.

Depth of processing and recall of threat material in fearful and nonfearful individuals

Although many studies have examined the nature of memory distortions in anxious individuals, few have considered biases in specific memory processes, such as encoding or retrieval. To investigate whether the presentation of threat material facilitates encoding biases, spider fearful (n=63), blood fearful (n=73), and nonfearful (n=75) participants encoded spider related, blood related, and neutral words as a function of three levels of processing (i.e., structural, semantic, and self referent). Participants subsequently completed either a free recall or a recognition task. All participants demonstrated a partial depth of processing effect, such that they recalled more words encoded in the self referent condition than in the other two conditions, but groups did not differ in their recall of stimuli as a function of word type. Relative to participants in the other groups, spider fearful participants had fewer spider related intrusions in the recall condition, and they made fewer errors in responding to structural and semantic encoding questions when spider related words were presented. These results contribute to an increasingly large body of literature suggesting that anxious individuals are not characterized by a memory bias toward threat, and they raise the possibility that individuals with spider fears process threat-relevant information differently than individuals with blood fears.

Tracking fear in snake and spider fearful participants during visual search: A multi-response domain study

In visual search tasks snake or spider fearful participants showed shorter reaction times (RTs) to respond to their feared animal (e.g., snake) than to the nonfeared animal (i.e., spider) (Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001). Here, we used this paradigm with heart rate (HR), RTs, and event-related potential (ERP) measures, to investigate the nature of the responses to the feared animal, a nonfeared (but fear-relevant) animal, and fear-irrelevant target stimuli with snake fearful, spider fearful, and nonfearful participants. Fearful participants showed shorter RTs and evoked larger amplitudes on a late positive potential (LPP; 500–700 ms) for their feared compared to the nonfeared and the fear-irrelevant targets. No relevant significant differences were found on early ERP components and HR measures. These findings do not support an involvement of early information processing in the detection of the feared animal in fearful participants, they favour instead a more elaborated analysis of these complex stimuli to achieve the detection.

From fear to love: Individual differences in implicit spider associations.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to investigate automatic fear associations in fear of spiders. Fear associations toward spiders were measured among spider fearful and nonfearful participants (Experiment 1) as well as among nonfearfuls and spider enthusiasts (Experiment 2). It was shown that the IAT is sensitive to personal automatic fear associations and therefore distinguishes between high-fearful, nonfearful, and enthusiastic participants. Moreover, implicit spider associations measured by the IAT predicted avoidance behavior beyond self-reports. The results of Experiment 2 provide additional support for the argument that implicit spider associations are different from general stereotypes or knowledge about spiders.

Recall of Schematic and Non-Schematic Material Related to Threat in Blood Fearful and Nonfearful Individuals

The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that blood fearful and nonfearful individuals would be differentiated by their pattern of recall of schematic and non-schematic prose material. Blood fearful (n=36) and nonfearful (n=40) individuals were presented with five prose passages describing harm or injury. Nine sentences in each passage described events representative of the schema content of most individuals, whereas six sentences in each passage described events that are not representative of typical schema content. Participants read passages that either described themselves experiencing the situations or described themselves witnessing others in the situations and completed a free recall task in both immediate (i.e. 2 minutes) and delayed (i.e. one week) recall conditions. Results did not replicate studies from the cognitive psychology literature on which this study was based. Instead, participants who read passages describing themselves in these situations recalled the gist of the material more accurately than participants who read passages in which they witnessed another individual in the situation. Blood fearful participants recalled the affective tone of neutral passages less accurately than nonfearful participants. Results suggest that activation of schema content has little influence on memory performance, although assessing the affective tone of recalled material detected subtle differences in memory performance between fearful and nonfearful groups.

Fear-relevant change detection in spider-fearful and non-fearful participants

Features of threatening stimuli are proposed to be processed fast and automatically, as they call for immediate attention. Phobic patients typically exhibit these attentional biases for stimuli that are relevant for their particular type of fear. In the present study, it was examined whether a change detection paradigm can be used to study attentional bias for fear-related stimuli. Twenty-five spider-fearful and 25 non-fearful participants were confronted with a series of pictures, in which sometimes a spider gradually appeared, sometimes a fear-irrelevant stimulus appeared, and sometimes no change occurred. Participants had to indicate whenever they noticed a change in the picture. Results showed a pattern of fear-relevant change detection. That is, spider changes were more frequently detected than fear-irrelevant changes, and spider-fearful participants detected more spider changes than non-fearful controls. Further, it was found that high-trait anxious participants did not detect more changes than low-trait anxious participants.

Activation and measurement of threat associations in fear of spiders: an application of the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task

The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (DeHouwer, EAST; Experimental Psychol. 50 (2003) 77) was used to assess how different context conditions lead to differential activation of cognitive schemata in anxiety. Participants completed two identical EASTs, in which ambiguous target words (e.g., legs, net) were categorized together with pleasant words and unpleasant, fear-related words. Each EAST was preceded by the presentation of pictures, activating either a ‘human’ concept or a ‘spider’ concept. Results indicated that spider fearful participants showed threat associations towards the target words, but only when the spider concept was primed. Non-fearful participants did not show threat associations with either type of priming. We conclude that impact of threat associations depends on the activated context, and that the EAST is suitable for the assessment of fear associations and their current activation level.

Sensitivity and response bias in fear of spiders

According to cognitive theories of anxiety, phobic patients are searching the environment for threatening stimuli, and detecting them rapidly. However, previous studies failed to find a lowered perceptual threshold for threatening stimuli in specific phobias. Therefore, two experiments applying a signal detection paradigm were conducted. Highly spider fearful and nonfearful participants were asked to decide whether a picture of a spider, beetle, or butterfly was presented. In both experiments, spider fearfuls were not better at detecting spiders, or any other animal, than healthy controls. Instead, spider fearfuls were more liberal in assuming that they had seen a spider or a beetle. In accord with earlier studies, these results suggest that spider phobics may exhibit an interpretation bias rather than improved detection of threat.

Access to information about harm and safety in spider fearful and nonfearful individuals: when they were good they were very very good but when they were bad they were horrid

This study tests two alternative hypotheses about how phobic information is processed in spider fearful and nonfearful individuals: (1) the threat-related cognitive set hypothesis and (2) the dimensions hypothesis. Counter to the traditional cognitive model of fear, the dimensions hypothesis predicts that spider fearful individuals tend to prioritise the harm–safety dimension when evaluating animal stimuli, and the consequent stretching of that evaluative dimension will confer advantage to the accessing of harm information when confronted with phobic stimuli, but conversely safety information when encountering FI stimuli. Spider fearful and nonfearful participants generated lists of reasons why spiders, fear relevant (e.g. tigers, snakes) and fear irrelevant (e.g. rabbits, kittens) animals might be harmful and might be safe. The findings indicate that, in comparison to a nonfearful group, spider fearful participants have facilitated access to both harm and safety information which is context dependent: spider fearful participants were able to generate more reasons why spiders may be harmful and fewer why they might be safe than nonfearful participants, but conversely were able to generate more reasons why fear irrelevant animals might by safe and fewer reasons why they might be harmful than the nonfearful group. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying fears and phobias are discussed.

The relationship between disgust sensitivity and avoidant behavior:: Studies of clinical and nonclinical samples

Researchers have reported links between specific phobias (of small animals and blood/injection/injury (BII)) and disgust sensitivity. Avoidance is one route by which disgust sensitivity may play a role in the etiology or maintenance of pathological fear. This paper discusses a series of three studies to examine behavior associated with disgust sensitivity. Study 1 examined disgust sensitivity and avoidance of disgust-evoking tasks among spider fearful and nonfearful participants. Study 2 reanalyzed previously published data on the relationship between disgust sensitivity and visual avoidance of BII stimuli and spiders. Study 3 examined disgust sensitivity in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Results indicate the trait of disgust sensitivity is a poor predictor of avoidance behavior in specific situations, but state disgust more consistently predicts avoidance, suggesting future research in specific phobia should shift emphasis toward examining the role of state disgust.