Differentiation between vicarious instigation and classical conditioning of electrodermal responses

In past research of vicarious conditioning when a conditioned stimulus (CS) was repeatedly presented both to a model and an observer, the observer's reaction to the CS may have been the result of a vicariously conditioned reaction to the CS, as well as a vicariously instigated reaction to the inferred emotional state of the model who anticipates the reception of a noxious stimulus when the CS is presented. In order to partial out these two reactions, the present experiment employed 32 subjects of both sexes who took part in a two-group study of differential, vicarious classical conditioning of skin conductance responses. In one of the group, the tones serving as CS+ and CS- and which preceded the aversive and non aversive events to the mode, were presented over earphones to both the confederate model and the observer subject. In the second group, only the subjects had earphones on and were led to believe that the model was not aware of the CS presentations. This eliminated the possibility of vicariously instigated reactions. Although the conditioning effects produced in the present study were somewhat weak, results clearly showed equal levels of vicarious instigation and conditioning in the two groups. These results indicate that the potential confounding of these two reactions studies has not significantly affected result or conclusions from previous studies.     

The relation of vicarious to direct instigation and conditioning of electrodermal responses

Abstract.— Three groups with 16 Ss each and run in pairs, participated in a differential, successive components, long interstimulus interval conditioning paradigm with the skin conductance response as dependent variable. For the problem solving group the task was described as guessing which of two lamps (CS₂s) would follow after two different tones (CS₁s). In the observer group they were further informed that the other subject in the pair, the model, would receive shocks at CS+ offset, which actually was the case for the model group. Skin conductance responses were scored in five intervals during and after the non-overlapping presentation of the two CSs with a duration of 8 sec each. The results indicated no differentiation in any interval for the problem-solvers, and parallel instigation to shock and threat of shock, and conditioning in the observer and model groups, with the exception of conditioning in the 1st interval for observers only. The results were interpreted as parallel instigation and conditioning between vicarious and direct learning, the reported difference being due only to different UCS-intensities causing a blocking of first-order conditioning in the model but not in the observer group.     

Emotion and cognition in vicarious instigation research

Abstract.— It is argued that the vicarious instigation research would benefit from integrating phenomena and distinctions acknowledged within emotion psychology and cognitive psychology. In particular, suggestions are made which aim at increasing the specificity of terminological, methodological, and interpretational aspects of vicarious instigation research.     

Effects of perceived similarity on vicarious emotional conditioning

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that perceived similarity between observers and models enhances vicarious emotional conditioning. Subjects were led to believe that they were either similar to the model in beliefs and attitudes, different from him or were given no information about him. They then underwent a vicarious classical conditioning procedure by witnessing the model express pain reactions in conjunction with a neutral stimulus. Observers developed emotional reactions to the neutral stimulus alone after seeing it paired with modeled pain expressions. Preceived similarity, however, had no significant effect on either the level of vicarious conditioning or the rate of extinction. Subjects who had no information concerning the model displayed stronger autonomic responses to the model's pain expressions, and more frequent and intense autonomic responses to the conditioned stimulus during tests for acquisition and extinction. In correlational analyses, subjects in the latter condition also yielded a significant positive relationship between self-reported arousal and vicarious emotional conditioning. The obtained findings were interpreted in terms of the emotion arousing properties of unfamiliarity.     

Some psychological determinants of electrodermal responses to deception

This study explores some of the psychological determinants of electrodermal responses to deception. There were four groups of 24 subjects, consisting of normal males and females, and personality-disordered males and females. The deceptive paradigms used consisted of three guilty knowledge card tasks that differed in the nature of the stimuli used and in procedural instructions. There was also a general question task involving five neutral questions and two emotive moral questions. After each task self-report analogue scales were administered in order to record the subjects' reactions to each task and the type of countermeasure they had used. The subjects also completed the Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Gough Socialization Scale and the Arrow-Dot test. Detectability on card tasks was found to relate to the following: procedural instructions, countermeasure strategies, involvement in the task, the extent to which the critical items are processed into memory, and lack of confidence in one's ability to beat the machine. Personality factors of Introversion, Neuroticism and Ego control had some significant correlations with differential responsivity but this was not consistent across subject samples or tasks. Differential responsivity to questions raising moral issues did not relate significantly to whether or not the subject admitted or denied such behaviour.     

Intolerance of uncertainty and perceived threat

The present study examined the relations between dimensions of intolerance of uncertainty (i.e., desire for predictability and uncertainty paralysis) and perceptions of threat (i.e., perceptions of the probabilities and costs of future undesirable outcomes) in a sample of 239 college students. Uncertainty paralysis was positively associated with both perceived probabilities and perceived costs for negative outcomes. Desire for predictability was positively associated with perceived costs for negative outcomes but was not associated with perceived probabilities for negative outcomes. When probability estimates for low base rate outcomes were examined separately, desire for predictability was negatively associated with perceived probabilities. Finally, perceived threat partially mediated the relations between dimensions of intolerance of uncertainty and worry. The results of the present study suggest mechanisms through which dimensions of intolerance of uncertainty might lead to excessive worry.     

Meaning buffers right-wing authoritarian responses to societal threat via the mediation of loss of perceived control

The literature shows that exposure to societal threat stemming from criminality can elicit an increase in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) via the mediation of the loss of perceived control. In this study, we investigated whether the perception of meaning can act as a buffering factor for such process, performing an experiment with 316 Italian university students (67.8% women; mean age = 25.81, SD = 9.18). A moderated mediation model showed that the loss of perceived control mediated the relation between societal threat stemming from criminality and RWA, but that the second link was significant only among people low in meaning. Limitations, implications and possible developments of this research are discussed.     

Lateral asymmetries in electrodermal responses to nonattended stimuli: a reply to Walker and Ceci

Walker and Ceci (1983) pose a number of interesting and potentially important criticisms and alternative explanations regarding the laterality finding and hypothesis of Dawson and Schell (1982). The present evaluation finds each of the criticisms and alternative explanations to be inadequate. We then distinguish between two alternative interpretations of the Dawson and Schell hypothesis, one based on inherent functional properties of the two hemispheres and the other based on the notion that each hemisphere is a partially independent pool of processing resources. Walker and Ceci's fundamental objection seems to apply only to the first interpretation.     

Lateral asymmetries in electrodermal responses to nonattended stimuli: a response to Dawson and Schell

Recently, Dawson and Schell (1982) provided convincing evidence that words presented to the nonattended ear during a dichotic-listening task undergo automatic semantic analysis in the absence of intention or awareness. Because of its methodological rigor, this finding is important in the context of the long-standing controversy surrounding the preattentive processing phenomenon. However, we challenge the authors' suggestion of a right-hemisphere locus for this phenomenon. We offer a methodological basis for the findings and propose a countersuggestion of a left hemisphere, or at least bilateral, processing locus.     

Heart-rate and electrodermal orienting responses to visual stimuli differing in complexity

Orienting response (OR) theory predicts that amount of information in the stimulus, or stimulus complexity, should be an important determinant of OR elicitation and habituation, more intense and more slowly habituating ORs being expected to complex than to simple stimuli. This prediction was tested in an experiment where subjects were exposed to simple and complex visual stimuli in randomized order, while heart-rate and skin conductance were measured. Complex stimuli evoked a more pronounced deceleratory heartrate response than did simple stimuli. However, the two conditions did not differ in rate of habituation of this response. For skin conductance responses, on the other hand, the complex stimulus took more trials than the simple stimulus to reach habituation, whereas the two conditions did not differ in response magnitude. Thus, the hypothesis of more intense orienting to complex stimuli was supported by the heart-rate data, and that of slower habituation to complex stimuli, of the skin conductance data.     

Resistance to extinction of conditioned electrodermal responses: a study of the incubation fear hypothesis

In the present study we examined Eysenck's incubation hypothesis of fear. Probability of skin conductance response (SCR) was analyzed for a sample of 79 undergraduate women, ranging in age from 18 to 25 years. Different groups of participants were conditioned to two levels of unconditioned stimuli (UCS) intensity and presented to three levels of unreinforced conditioned stimuli (CS) exposures (extinction phase) in a delay differential conditioning paradigm. The CSs were fear-relevant slides (snakes and spiders) and the UCSs were aversive tones. Analysis did not show a clear incubation effect; instead an increased resistance to extinction of SCR probability in association to the high-UCS and the short unreinforced CS presentation was evident. Findings support partially Eysenck's incubation theory of fear/anxiety.     

Psychophysical relation between perceived threat of AIDS and willingness to impose social restrictions

Psychophysical methods were applied to measure and analyze attitudes toward the threat and control of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Participants rated and gave magnitude estimations for the amount of social restriction in 12 possibilities for controlling AIDS. The relation between ratings and magnitude estimations was curvilinear, meaning that the high end of a rating scale may mask large differences in magnitudes. Perceived threat to society increased as the estimated number of people with the virus increased. The amount of social restriction imposed was a negatively accelerated growth function of increasing levels of threat. The negative acceleration was probably due to ethical considerations associated with more stringent methods of control. The methodology involved in this experiment could be useful in evaluating public attitudes toward AIDS and other complex health issues and could provide additional information for making education and policy decisions.     

Validation and measurement of perceived environmental threat as an antecedent to job insecurity

The Perceived Environmental Threat scale was designed to measure perception of environmental sources of threat to an individual's job. A total of 276 managers responded to a survey to test the psychometric characteristics. Analysis supported the internal reliability and factor structure and anticipated correlations were observed with two measures of job insecurity. The Perceived Environmental Threat scale also demonstrated convergent validity as scores correlated positively with those on Anticipated Organizational Change which, generally, did not correlate significantly with trust, commitment, or role ambiguity, variables with which it was not expected to be related. The evidence was generally supportive of the overall psychometric properties, offering academic researchers and managers a useful means of evaluating perceived environmental threat.     

Hispanics in Ivy: Assessing identity and perceived threat

Membership in social groups is an important aspect of the self-concept, as a number of theorists such as Tajfel (1981) have recognized, and ethnic identity is a major exemplar of such groupings. In the present research, we focus on the particular case of Hispanic identity and the degree to which that identity may be threatened for first-year Hispanic students who enter a predominantly Anglo university. Forty-five Hispanic students (17 female, 28 male) at two Ivy League universities were interviewed early in their first year to assess Hispanic identity, collective self-esteem (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1988), and perceived threats to Hispanic identity. In addition, we considered the degree to which strength of cultural background relates to self-esteem and to perceptions of threat. The majority of students claimed Hispanic as an important identity. Strength of cultural background generally acted as a buffer to perceived threat, particularly for men. Cultural background was also related to collective self-esteem for men but not for women, even though Hispanic identity was more important for women than men. The results attest to the importance of both gender and ethnicity to self-definition and self-esteem, as well as to the complexity of the relationships among these variables.We thank Tracey Revenson as well as the members of the Identity Research Seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Assessing women's responses to sexual threat: validity of a virtual role-play procedure

This study evaluated the validity of a role-play procedure that uses virtual reality technology to assess women's responses to sexual threat. Forty-eight female undergraduate students were randomly assigned to either a standard, face-to-face role-play (RP) or a virtual role-play (VRP) of a sexually coercive situation. A multimethod assessment strategy was used to evaluate the efficacy of the role-play procedure in creating a realistic and immersive situation. Consistent with our hypotheses, women in the VRP condition exhibited greater negative affect and immersion than women in the RP condition. In addition, the level of assertive refusal in the VRP, but not the RP, condition differentiated between women with and without a prior history of sexual victimization. These findings provide evidence of the validity of a virtual role-play procedure for assessing women's responses in sexually threatening situations.     

Conditioning of counter-empathetic emotional responses

The present research tested the hypothesis that the quality of an observer's vicarious emotional response, as measured by autonomic, expressive, and self-report indexes, is a function of the observer's conditioning history with particular facial expressive displays of emotion. It was predicted that conditions of congruence (Symmetry) between the affective expression of a model and the outcome (shock or reward) presented to an observer would enhance initial empathetic responses, but that conditions of incongruence (Asymmetry) between the model's displays and observer's outcomes would lead to counter-empathetic responses. These changes in the quality of observers' vicarious emotional responses should generalize to a test phase when no rewards or punishments are presented to observers. The results for all measures were consistent and indicate that asymmetric conditioning modified the initial empathetic responses of observers to either counter-empathetic responses or indifference. On the other hand, symmetric conditioning enhanced observers' initial empathetic responses. These effects were evident in the test phase when no reinforcements were administered to the subject. The results are consistent with the theoretical assumption that facial expressions of emotion can acquire meaning and hedonic valence because of their predictive significance and thus can function as conditioned stimuli capable of evoking empathetic and counter-empathetic emotional responses.