| Abstract: | Two experiments were conducted to explore neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli. Contingency assessments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from animalearful individuals during probabilistic classification learning in diverse motivational—affective contexts. As revealed by ERPs, attentional amplification of cortical sensory processing occurred in response to phobiarelated stimuli. In particular, the posterior selection negativity in the ERPs to phobiaelated stimuli had its origin in a bottom-up route, probably the amygdaloid—extrastriate cortex path. No evidence for top-down modulation of phobia-related attentional amplification was obtained. The covariation bias occurred only when aversive motivational—affective expectancies prevailed, suggesting a role of retrieval from associative emotional memory. Finally, phobia-related cue competition was probably related to the disruption of elaboration in memory of neutral and aversive stimulus pairings that was induced by belonging pairings of phobia-related and aversive stimuli. The findings have far-reaching implications for the interface between cognition and emotion. |
