Authoritarianism and fear responses to pictures: The role of social differences

Authoritarianism can be defined as the covariation of authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism (Altemeyer, 1981). All three of these tendencies involve adherence to specific standards of behavior: standards that could be exposed to threat and disruption. This study is an investigation of the self‐reported fear of authoritarians in response to threats. A sample of 126 university students was exposed to a series of pictures of potentially threatening people and situations. In general, participants with high scores on authoritarianism were more fearful than participants with low scores. This result was found for both social threats (i.e., social differences, social disorder) and personal threats (i.e., animals, dangerous situations). The strongest association between authoritarianism and fear involved cases of social differences, defined as elements of a person's appearance or behavior that involve diversity or deviance from common social norms. Regression analyses also indicated that variation in authoritarianism could be best predicted by fear of social differences. Thus, these data suggest that authoritarians are relatively sensitive to threat, and particularly to threats involving the “outsider” who does not fit authoritarian standards of uniformity and order. The data are also consistent with recent research and theory that right‐wing ideology is at least partly motivated by threat and fear.     

Age and Gender Differences in Children's Halloween Costumes

Based on data reported by Serbin and Sprafkin (1986), we predicted that the Halloween costumes of first and second graders would be less gender stereotyped than those of preschoolers and children in kindergarten. Children from one public elementary school and two preschools (N = 178) were individually interviewed on Halloween. Children were asked which character they were, who they wanted to be next year, and their age. The resulting 113 different costumes were then rated by college students for degree of masculinity, femininity, and scariness. In addition to main effects of gender and grade, two of four predicted interactions were significant. Older boys tended to prefer less masculine and more feminine costumes than younger boys, and older girls tended to prefer more masculine and less feminine costumes than younger girls.     

Seeing and Being Seen: Courage and the Therapist in Cross-Racial Treatment

ABSTRACT

Correction of the patient's distortion is often the focus of therapeutic treatment. However, the therapist's distortions, based upon pre-existing fears, which themselves are often rooted in greater societal issues and energized by the work with the patient (especially as they relate to issues of racial difference between the therapist and patient), can lead to clinical impasse. Just as an effective treatment relies upon the patient's opening up to correcting distortions, so too the therapist must be able to use transference response and become vulnerable to knowing and moving beyond his own fears and distortions.     

Strategic and Automatic Threat Processing in Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain: A Startle Probe Investigation

Attentional bias research with chronic pain samples has yielded conflicting results. In the present investigation the startle paradigm was used to test the postulate that fear‐based mechanisms play an important role in attentional biases for pain‐related threat in chronic pain. Participants, including 31 individuals with chronic musculoskeletal pain and 20 healthy controls, completed a startle task designed to measure attention to different types of words (neutral vs sensory pain vs affective pain vs health catastrophe) presented at different levels of cognitive processing (strategic vs automatic). Measures of fear‐based individual difference variables, including anxiety sensitivity and fear of pain, were also completed. Startle amplitudes and latencies to acoustic startle probes that followed word presentations were recorded. Data were analyzed with repeated measures ANOVAs and correlational analysis. Significant between‐group differences were found indicating that, relative to chronic pain participants, healthy controls had higher startle amplitude index scores for health catastrophe words. There was also a trend among patients with chronic pain for greater startle amplitude index scores for strategic presentations of sensory pain words. In the automatic condition, all participants demonstrated a lower startle latency index for sensory words relative to both affect and health catastrophe words, suggesting participants had more difficulty disengaging from affect and health catastrophe words or were more avoidant of sensory words. Correlational analyses indicated that startle response indices for words related to health catastrophe became more pronounced for chronic pain patients as anxiety sensitivity and fear of pain increased. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Fear in Adolescent Dating Relationships

The aims of this study were to assess fearful and aversive aspects of dating relationships among teens and to examine those experiences by gender. We examined both survey data and cognitive interviews with teens to understand how teens experience their dating relationships and how they interpret the meaning of the items in a fear measure modified for use with teens. We found that fearful and aversive dating situations are common in adolescent dating relationships. As teens move along the continuum from friendships to romantic involvement, both boys and girls experience the aggressive and coercive behaviors that sometimes accompany these new emotional and interpersonal situations.     

Religiosity and fear of death: a three‐nation comparison

Numerous studies have sought to determine if religiosity is correlated with fear of death. Findings have been anything but consistent, with reports of negative relationships, positive relationships, no relationship, and even curvilinear associations. To shed light on this still contentious issue, the present study was undertaken among college students in three countries – Malaysia, Turkey, and the United States. Overall, the patterns in all three countries were similar. When linearity was assumed, there is a substantial positive correlation between most religiosity measures and fear of death. Assuming curvilinearity added slightly to the strength of the relationships in the US data and nothing to data from Malaysia or Turkey. Other findings were that on average females were more religious and feared death more than did males, and Muslims expressed considerably greater fear than did members of any other major religion. Results were discussed in the context of a new theory – called death apprehension theory. Among other things, it specifically predicts that death apprehension will be positively related to most religious beliefs and practices.     

Comparing thought suppression and mindfulness as coping techniques for spider fear

The current study compared thought suppression, focused attention (mindfulness) and unfocused attention as strategies for managing spider fear. Spider fearful participants were exposed to a strategy induction before completing a Behavioural Approach Test (BAT). The BAT is a 10 step measurement of how close participants are willing to move towards a spider. Participants were instructed to use what they learned in the pre-BAT induction to help them advance through the steps of the BAT. The results of the study indicated that participants given the thought suppression or the unfocused attention induction moved through significantly less steps of the BAT than did those given the focused attention (mindful) induction. Additionally, the thought suppression group felt significantly more anxious than the focused and unfocused attention groups following completion of the BAT. These results are discussed in terms of the impact of thought suppression on avoidance behaviour in phobias.     

The Effect of Counterconditioning on Evaluative Responses and Harm Expectancy in a Fear Conditioning Paradigm

In fear conditioning, extinction targets harm expectancy as well as the fear response, but it often fails to eradicate the negative affective value that is associated with the conditioned stimulus. In the present study, we examined whether counterconditioning can serve to reduce evaluative responses within fear conditioning. The sample consisted of 70 nonselected students, 12 of whom were men. All participants received acquisition with human face stimuli as the conditioned stimuli and an unpleasant white noise as the unconditioned stimulus. After acquisition, one third of the sample was allocated to an extinction procedure. The other participants received counterconditioning with either a neutral stimulus (neutral tone) or a positive stimulus (baby laugh). Results showed that counterconditioning (with both neutral and positive stimuli), in contrast to extinction, successfully reduced evaluative responses. This effect was found on an indirect measure (affective priming task), but not on self-report. Counterconditioning with a positive stimulus also tended to enhance the reduction of conditioned skin conductance reactivity. The present data suggest that counterconditioning procedures might be a promising approach in diminishing evaluative learning and even expectancy learning in the context of fear conditioning.     

Mediators of the shame-guilt-psychological adjustment relationship

Lynch, J. S., Hill, E. D., Nagoshi, J. L. & Nagoshi, C. T. Mediators of the shame-guilt-psychological adjustment relationship. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 437-443. A college student sample (109 women, 90 men) was administered measures of psychological adjustment, shame, guilt, personal fear of invalidity, and aspects of empathy, including personal distress in emergencies and fantasy involvement. Consistent with previous studies, shame but not guilt was significantly positively correlated with poor psychological adjustment. Path analyses with bootstrapped mediation tests indicated that the shame-adjustment relationship was significantly mediated by fear of invalidity, personal distress, and fantasy involvement. A novel finding was that the relationship between guilt and maladjustment was significantly mediated by proneness to fantasy. The findings are discussed in terms of an integrated theory of the shame-fear/distress-maladjustment relationship as a framework for understanding the maladaptive, individualistic shame experience.