恐惧与厌恶情绪图片系统的编制：基于两种情绪的区分

基于恐惧与厌恶情绪刺激材料界定模糊的问题,实验一在总结前人研究中实验材料方面混淆恐惧和厌恶的基础上,通过问卷法完成了对恐惧与厌恶图片系统初步的搜集、整理工作;实验二通过进一步测评得到了具有良好信度的恐惧与厌恶情绪图片系统,图片系统中的恐惧与厌恶情绪很好的分离,且图片系统中动物、场景、物体三类图片的恐惧、厌恶程度均存在显著差异,可适用于需要不同种类情绪刺激的具体应用性研究。     

恐惧与厌恶情绪图片系统的编制：基于两种情绪的区分

基于恐惧与厌恶情绪刺激材料界定模糊的问题,实验一在总结前人研究中实验材料方面混淆恐惧和厌恶的基础上,通过问卷法完成了对恐惧与厌恶图片系统初步的搜集、整理工作;实验二通过进一步测评得到了具有良好信度的恐惧与厌恶情绪图片系统,图片系统中的恐惧与厌恶情绪很好的分离,且图片系统中动物、场景、物体三类图片的恐惧、厌恶程度均存在显著差异,可适用于需要不同种类情绪刺激的具体应用性研究。     

Emotional scenes elicit more pronounced self-reported emotional experience and greater EPN and LPP modulation when compared to emotional faces

Emotional faces and scenes carry a wealth of overlapping and distinct perceptual information. Despite widespread use in the investigation of emotional perception, expressive face and evocative scene stimuli are rarely assessed in the same experiment. Here, we evaluated self-reports of arousal and pleasantness, as well as early and late event-related potentials (e.g., N170, early posterior negativity [EPN], late positive potential [LPP]) as subjects viewed neutral and emotional faces and scenes, including contents representing anger, fear, and joy. Results demonstrate that emotional scenes were rated as more evocative than emotional faces, as only scenes produced elevated self-reports of arousal. In addition, viewing scenes resulted in more extreme ratings of pleasantness (and unpleasantness) than did faces. EEG results indicate that both expressive faces and emotional scenes evoke enhanced negativity in the N170 component, while the EPN and LPP components show significantly enhanced modulation only by scene, relative to face stimuli. These data suggest that viewing emotional scenes results in a more pronounced emotional experience that is associated with reliable modulation of visual event-related potentials that are implicated in emotional circuits in the brain.     

Irrational Cognitions and the Fear of Flying

In order to test the hypothesis that the fear of flying is associated with irrational evaluative beliefs, as postulated by Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy for anxiety disorders, 15 fearful flyers and 7 non-fearful flyers participated in the Articulated Thoughts during Simulated Situations procedure. Six experimental scenes depicting some basic fears associated with the fear of flying and six supposedly non-anxiety provoking flight-related control scenes were used. The fear of flying group displayed significantly more irrational thoughts and significantly higher subjective ratings of anxiety on all experimental and five control scenes compared to the non-fearful flyers. Their negative cognitions were predominantly characterized by awfulizing and low frustration tolerance. The results are interpreted as offering support for the cognitive view that anxiety, and the fear of flying, are associated with negative cognitions characterized by a preoccupation with danger and with an overestimation of the seriousness of the perceived threat (awfulizing) and an underestimation of coping abilities (low frustration tolerance).     

Scary and nasty beasts: Self-reported fear and disgust of common phobic animals

Animal phobias are one of the most prevalent mental disorders. We analysed how fear and disgust, two emotions involved in their onset and maintenance, are elicited by common phobic animals. In an online survey, the subjects rated 25 animal images according to elicited fear and disgust. Additionally, they completed four psychometrics, the Fear Survey Schedule II (FSS), Disgust Scale – Revised (DS-R), Snake Questionnaire (SNAQ), and Spider Questionnaire (SPQ). Based on a redundancy analysis, fear and disgust image ratings could be described by two axes, one reflecting a general negative perception of animals associated with higher FSS and DS-R scores and the second one describing a specific aversion to snakes and spiders associated with higher SNAQ and SPQ scores. The animals can be separated into five distinct clusters: (1) non-slimy invertebrates; (2) snakes; (3) mice, rats, and bats; (4) human endo- and exoparasites (intestinal helminths and louse); and (5) farm/pet animals. However, only snakes, spiders, and parasites evoke intense fear and disgust in the non-clinical population. In conclusion, rating animal images according to fear and disgust can be an alternative and reliable method to standard scales. Moreover, tendencies to overgeneralize irrational fears onto other harmless species from the same category can be used for quick animal phobia detection.     

Effects of fear on risk and control judgements and memory: Implications for health promotion messages

Health promotion messages that evoke fear are often used to decrease unrealistic optimism regarding risks, convince people to control their behaviour, and make risks memorable. The relations among emotions, risk and control judgements, and memory are not well understood, however. In the current study, participants (N = 94) were assigned to fearful, angry, happy, or neutral emotion-elicitation conditions. They then rated the likelihood of experiencing 15 negative and 15 positive matched outcomes and rated their degree of control over each outcome. A surprise memory test followed. Fear decreased unrealistic optimism, but the greater the intensity of fear reported the less control participants believed they had over outcomes. Fear also led to poorer memory for outcomes. Across all participants, the lower their ratings of optimism and control concerning outcomes, the less likely they were to recall them. Implications for the use of emotionally evocative material in health promotion messages are discussed.     

Statistical learning using real-world scenes: extracting categorical regularities without conscious intent

ABSTRACT— Recent work has shown that observers can parse streams of syllables, tones, or visual shapes and learn statistical regularities in them without conscious intent (e.g., learn that A is always followed by B). Here, we demonstrate that these statistical-learning mechanisms can operate at an abstract, conceptual level. In Experiments 1 and 2, observers incidentally learned which semantic categories of natural scenes covaried (e.g., kitchen scenes were always followed by forest scenes). In Experiments 3 and 4, category learning with images of scenes transferred to words that represented the categories. In each experiment, the category of the scenes was irrelevant to the task. Together, these results suggest that statistical-learning mechanisms can operate at a categorical level, enabling generalization of learned regularities using existing conceptual knowledge. Such mechanisms may guide learning in domains as disparate as the acquisition of causal knowledge and the development of cognitive maps from environmental exploration.     

The contribution of category relationships to similarity ratings.

Two experiments produced evidence that category relationships contribute to similarity ratings. In Experiment 1, participants gave similarity ratings with respect to a semantic category (VEGETABLE) and a set of exemplars, some of which were members of the category (e.g., BROCCOLI) and some of which were not (e.g., BANANA). A regression analysis was used to predict the similarity ratings in terms of numbers of common and distinctive features, as reported by other participants. Perceived similarity was greater for examplars that were members of the category, independently of feature overlap. Experiment 2 examined similarity ratings with respect to pairs of exemplars. In some cases, both exemplars were members of the same category (e.g., BROCCOLI/CUCUMBER). In other cases, one exemplar was a member of the category and the other was not (e.g., BROCCOLI/BANANA). A regression analysis was used to predict the similarity ratings in terms of numbers of common and distinctive features. Perceived similarity was greater when both exemplars were members of the same category, independently of feature overlap.     

See red? Turn pale? Unveiling emotions through cardiovascular and hemodynamic changes

Cardiodynamic and hemodynamic reactions to emotion-eliciting film sequences were investigated. Thirty-two healthy subjects (12 women, 20 men) were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In the first group, anger was induced using selected scenes of the film "Ragtime." In the second group, scenes of the film "The Shining" were chosen to elicit fear. A documentary film was used as a baseline stimulus in both groups. EKG, impedance cardiography, and blood pressure were continuously monitored. The two emotional conditions elicited significant differential changes in subjective ratings and cardiovascular indices. Fear was associated with decreased cardiac output, increased total peripheral resistance, and a reduction in stroke volume and myocardial contractility. Anger was associated with an increase of cardiac output and small changes in total peripheral resistance. These results support the hypothesis that discrete emotions such as fear and anger elicit differential patterns of physiological responses.     

Manifestations, acquisition and diagnostic categories of dental fear in a self-referred population

This study aimed to clarify how manifestations and acquisition relate to diagnostic categories of dental fear in a population of self-referred dental fear patients, since diagnostic criteria specifically related to dental fear have not been validated. DSM III-R diagnostic criteria for phobias were used to compare with four existing dental fear diagnostic categories, referred to as the Seattle system. Subjects were 208 persons with dental fear who were telephone interviewed, of whom a subsample of 155 responded to a mailed Dental Anxiety Scale (DAS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and a modified FSS-II Geer Fear Scale (GFS). Personal interviews and a Dental Beliefs Scale of perceived trust and social interaction with dentists were also used to evaluate a subsample of 80 patients selected by sex and high dental fear. Results showed that the majority of the 80 patients (66%), suffered from social embarrassment about their dental fear problem and their inability to do something about it. The largest cause of their fear (84%) was reported to be traumatic dental experiences, especially in childhood (70%). A minority of patients (16%) could not isolate traumatic experiences and had a history of general fearfulness or anxiety. Analysis of GFS data for the 155 subjects showed that fear of snakes and injuries were highest among women; heights and injections among men. Fear of blood was rarely reported. Spearman correlations between GFS individual items and DAS scores indicated functional independence between dental fear and common fears such as blood, injections and enclosures in most cases. Only in specific types of dental fear did these results support Rachman and Lopatka's contention that fears are thought to summate.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Introducing the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS)

We introduce the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS), an open-access online stimulus set containing 900 color images depicting a broad spectrum of themes, including humans, animals, objects, and scenes, along with normative ratings on two affective dimensions—valence (i.e., the degree of positive or negative affective response that the image evokes) and arousal (i.e., the intensity of the affective response that the image evokes). The OASIS images were collected from online sources, and valence and arousal ratings were obtained in an online study (total N = 822). The valence and arousal ratings covered much of the circumplex space and were highly reliable and consistent across gender groups. OASIS has four advantages: (a) the stimulus set contains a large number of images in four categories; (b) the data were collected in 2015, and thus OASIS features more current images and reflects more current ratings of valence and arousal than do existing stimulus sets; (c) the OASIS database affords users the ability to interactively explore images by category and ratings; and, most critically, (d) OASIS allows for free use of the images in online and offline research studies, as they are not subject to the copyright restrictions that apply to the International Affective Picture System. The OASIS images, along with normative valence and arousal ratings, are available for download from www.benedekkurdi.com/#oasis or https://db.tt/yYTZYCga.     

The Disruptive Adolescent as a Grown-Up: Predicting Adult Startle Responses to Violent and Erotic Films from Adolescent Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits

The current study aimed to identify heterogeneous groups of adolescents differing on their levels of conduct problems (CP) and callous-unemotional (CU) traits, and compare them on startle reactivity to emotional videos (violent/erotic) during young adulthood. A Latent Profile Analysis, conducted among a longitudinal sample of 2306 adolescents, provided evidence for the existence of heterogeneous CP and CU subgroups (i.e., CP-only, CU-only, and CP+CU groups). Three years later, 82 young adults (Mage?=?19.95), randomly selected from the identified groups, participated in an experiment assessing their startle eye-blink responses during violent, erotic and neutral video scenes. Self-report ratings of fear, valence and arousal to affective scenes were also collected. Findings suggested that adolescents high on CP and low on CU traits showed high startle potentiation when viewing violent scenes during young adulthood, while those high on both CP and CU traits showed diminished startle reactivity to violent stimuli. Individuals high on CU traits without CP showed similar startle reactivity to controls. Further, the findings indicate that startle potentiation to violent stimuli can be a reliable physiological marker to distinguish antisocial individuals with and without CU traits. The finding that the CU only group was not differentiated from the control group on startle reactivity when viewing violent stimuli might explain their lower likelihood of engaging in antisocial behavior.     

Afraid of one afraid of all: When threat associations spread across face-types

Fear can be acquired for objects not inherently associated with threat (e.g. birds), and this threat may generalize from prototypical to peripheral category members (e.g. crows vs. penguins). When categorizing people, pervasive stereotypes link Black men to assumed violence and criminality. Faces with Afrocentric features (prototypical) are more often associated with threat and criminality than non-Afrocentric (peripheral) faces regardless of whether the individual is Black or White. In this study, using a priming paradigm, threat associations related to negative racial stereotypes were tested as a vehicle for spreading fear across face-type categories. Results showed more negative than positive judgments for White face targets but only when the prime was primarily non-Afrocentric (i.e. Eurocentric). Black face targets were judged more negatively than positively regardless of prime. This suggests some cognitive processes related to threat generalizations of objects extend to complex social categories.     

Multivariate Response Patterning of Fear and Anger

This study examined whether differential response patterns are associated with the emotions of fear and anger as compared to neutral and physical action imagery conditions in 27 right-handed male volunteers screened for imagery ability and alexithymia. Fear, anger, neutral, and action states were significantly differentiated on the basis of autonomic measures and facial electromyographic (EMG) responses. Discriminant function analyses (DFAs) using autonomic and facial EMG measures conducted separately on data from two experimental sessions revealed 78% and 72% correct classification of fear and anger, and neutral conditions, respectively. Cross-validation of the DFA using discriminant weights of the first session to classify the second session data led to a 66.5% correct classification of the fear and anger, and neutral imagery conditions. The combined average of both sessions revealed an 84% correct classification rate. Further, when subjective ratings were added to the discriminant function as a manipulation check for the experimental procedure, a 99% correct classification rate was obtained. These data indicate that emotion-specific response patterns for fear and anger are accurately differentiable from each other and from neutral imagery conditions. The findings provide support for the cognitive-physiological network models of physiological emotion specificity.     

Functional connectivity dynamics during film viewing reveal common networks for different emotional experiences

Recent theoretical and empirical work has highlighted the role of domain-general, large-scale brain networks in generating emotional experiences. These networks are hypothesized to process aspects of emotional experiences that are not unique to a specific emotional category (e.g., “sadness,” “happiness”), but rather that generalize across categories. In this article, we examined the dynamic interactions (i.e., changing cohesiveness) between specific domain-general networks across time while participants experienced various instances of sadness, fear, and anger. We used a novel method for probing the network connectivity dynamics between two salience networks and three amygdala-based networks. We hypothesized, and found, that the functional connectivity between these networks covaried with the intensity of different emotional experiences. Stronger connectivity between the dorsal salience network and the medial amygdala network was associated with more intense ratings of emotional experience across six different instances of the three emotion categories examined. Also, stronger connectivity between the dorsal salience network and the ventrolateral amygdala network was associated with more intense ratings of emotional experience across five out of the six different instances. Our findings demonstrate that a variety of emotional experiences are associated with dynamic interactions of domain-general neural systems.     

Generalisation of fear and avoidance along a semantic continuum

Directly conditioned fear and avoidance readily generalises to dissimilar but conceptually related stimuli. Here, for the first time, we examined the conceptual/semantic generalisation of both fear and avoidance using real words (synonyms). Participants were first exposed to a differential fear conditioning procedure in which one word (e.g., “broth”; CS+) was followed with brief electric shock [unconditioned stimulus (US)] and another was not (e.g., “assist”; CS–). Next, an instrumental conditioning phase taught avoidance in the presence the CS+ but not the CS–. During generalisation testing, synonyms of the CS+ (e.g., “soup”; GCS+) and CS– (e.g., “help”; GCS–) were presented in the absence of shock. Conditioned fear and avoidance, measured via skin conductance responses, behavioural avoidance and US expectancy ratings, generalised to the semantically related, but not to the semantically unrelated, synonyms. Findings have implications for how natural language categories and concepts mediate the expansion of fear and avoidance repertoires in clinical contexts.     

状态焦虑对条件性恐惧泛化的影响

恐惧的过度泛化是焦虑障碍患者重要的潜在病因,探索焦虑对恐惧泛化的影响具有重要意义。本研究在恐惧习得后,通过恐惧创伤电影范式诱发状态焦虑组被试的焦虑水平,采用主观预期值和皮电反应值作为指标,考察状态焦虑对条件性恐惧泛化的影响。结果表明,恐惧创伤电影范式显著提高了状态焦虑组被试的焦虑水平。在泛化阶段,状态焦虑组被试表现出更强的恐惧泛化,对与条件刺激相似的泛化刺激表现出更强烈的恐惧以及更高的预期。状态焦虑使得被试恐惧泛化的消退更慢,持续时间更长。研究同时发现,在状态焦虑下,被试对条件刺激的辨识出现增强趋势。研究结果提示在对经历负性事件个体进行临床干预时,可通过降低其焦虑水平来减少过度泛化。