Effects of vicarious disgust learning on the development of fear, disgust, and attentional biases in children.

Abstract

Fear and disgust are defensive emotions that have evolved to protect us from harm. While fear is thought to elicit an instinctive response to deal with immediate threat, disgust elicits immediate sensory rejection to avoid contamination. One mechanism through which disgust and fear may be linked is via attentional bias towards threat. Attentional bias is a well-established feature of anxiety disorders and is known to increase following vicarious fear learning. However, the contribution of vicarious learning to the development of disgustrelated attentional biases is currently unknown. Furthermore, the influence of individual differences in disgust propensity and disgust sensitivity on fear and disgust responses has not been investigated in the context of vicarious learning. Therefore, 53 children aged 7-9 years were randomly assigned to receive either fear vicarious learning or disgust vicarious learning. Children's fear beliefs, disgust beliefs, avoidance preferences and attentional bias were measured at baseline and post-learning. Findings demonstrated increased fear and disgust responding to stimuli following disgust and fear vicarious learning. Crucially, the study provided the first evidence that disgust vicarious learning can create an attentional bias for threat in children similar to that created via fear vicarious learning. However, there was no relationship between disgust propensity and sensitivity and vicariously acquired increases in fear, disgust and attention. In conclusion, both fear and disgust vicarious learning can create attentional bias, allowing rapid detection of potentially harmful stimuli. This effect could contribute to fear development and is found even in children who are not particularly high in disgust proneness.

Impaired Facial Emotion Recognition in Individuals at Ultra-High Risk for Psychosis and Associations With Schizotypy and Paranoia Level

“…In this respect, disgust could be thought of as a similar group of emotions that can be perceived as being hostile such as fear and anger in paranoia. ( 19 – 21 ). Although bias toward threat-related emotions seem to be consistent in schizophrenia ( 14 – 16 ), few studies have evaluated this bias in the UHR phase ( 8 ).…”

Readiness for Weaning Scale: Development and psychometric measurement study

“…In the infant readiness dimension, there were items to determine the baby's readiness to stop breastfeeding. In addition to the unpreparedness of the baby, weaning techniques can also have traumatic effects on the child (Reynolds & Askew, 2019;Gök et al, 2018;Gürarslan et al, 2018;Yüzer Alsaç & Polat, 2018;Al-Sagarat & Al-Kharabsheh, 2017;Knowles et al, 2019). In the weaning technique dimension, there were statements questioning the mother's level of knowledge in terms of the correct timing and the correct technique.…”

Disgust Processing and Potential Relationships with Behaviors in Autism

“…Around the age of seven, children learn about disgust vicariously, by watching others or hearing of others having disgust experiences [ 97 ]. The ability to recognize another person’s disgusted facial expression, a first step to vicarious disgust processing, involves neural activity in facial emotion recognition (FER) circuits (inferior occipital regions, fusiform face area [FFA], the posterior superior temporal sulcus [pSTS]), and emotion-related brain regions like the insula and amygdala [ 39 , 97 ].…”