Expectancy Bias for Fear and Disgust and Behavioral Avoidance in Spider Fearful Individuals

Abstract

The study examines the relationship between fear and disgust-related expectancies of covariation and avoidance in spider fearful individuals. Participants high (n = 22) and low (n = 28) in spider fear were asked to rate the probability that spider pictures, disgust-relevant pictures (e.g., rotting foods and body products), and neutral pictures (e.g., tools and appliances) would be followed by one of three possible outcomes: fear, disgust, or neutral facial expressions. Participants then engaged in a behavioral avoidance task (BAT) that required them to approach and open a black box containing a spider that was placed 13 feet away. No significant differences between high and low spider fearful participants were found for expectancies for the spider picture-fear expression pairings. However, the high spider fear participants reported significantly higher expectancies than low spider fear participants for the spider picture-disgust expression pairings. Conversely, the low spider fear group reported significantly higher expectancies than the high spider fear participants for the spider picture-neutral expression pairings. Furthermore, higher expectancies for the disgust expression to be paired with spider pictures were significantly associated with avoidance on the BAT. These findings provide additional support for the role of disgust in spider phobia.

Information processing in contamination fear: A covariation bias examination of fear and disgust

“…Outcome stimuli consisted of pictures of humans (three male and three female) making emotion-specific facial expressions (i.e., fear, disgust, neutral). These pictorial facial expressions have been previously demonstrated to display reliable emotionspecific displays (Olatunji, Cisler, Meunier, Connolly, & Lohr, 2008;Olatunji, Lohr, Willems, & Sawchuk, 2006).…”

When Faces Signal Danger: Event-Related Potentials to Emotional Facial Expressions in Animal Phobics

“…Moreover, affective information from faces has been proved to be detected at early processing stages [33] . For all these reasons, facial expressions may be considered as ecologically valid indicators of possible aversive consequences in the phobic context [34] .…”

“…Fearful, disgusted and angry faces were employed to examine whether a processing bias would emerge in response to generally negative facial emotions or only to those facial expressions signaling the possible presence of the phobic object in the environment. A large number of studies suggest that, in addition to fear, disgust plays a major role in a range of anxiety disorders including animal and blood phobias [34,39] . Snake or spider phobics exposed to their phobic object show fear and disgust reactions at subjective, cognitive, physiological and behavioral levels [40] .…”

Psychometric Properties of a Behavioral Test of Contamination-Related Obsessive–Compulsive Symptoms

“…Some researchers have successfully used behavioral assessments for Social Phobia and Specific Phobia (e.g., Amir et al 2008;Buchanan and Houlihan 2008;Olatunji et al 2008;Teachman 2007). However, most researchers of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) still rely solely on self report measures, despite the MTMM recommendations.…”