How you perceive threat determines your behavior

Abstract

The prioritization of processing emotional stimuli usually produces deleterious effects on task performance when it distracts from a task. One common explanation is that brain resources are consumed by emotional stimuli, diverting resources away from executing the task. Viewing unpleasant stimuli also generates defensive reactions, and these responses may be at least partially responsible for the effect of the emotional modulation observed in various reaction time (RT) paradigms. We investigated whether modulatory effects on RT vary if we presented threat stimuli to prompt different defensive responses. To trigger different responses, we manipulated threat perception by moving the direction of threatening stimuli. Threatening or neutral stimuli were presented as distractors during a bar orientation discrimination task. The results demonstrated that threat stimuli directed toward the observer produced a decrease in RT; in contrast, threat stimuli directed away from the observer produced an increase in RT, when compared to neutral stimuli. Accelerated RT during directed toward threat stimuli was attributed to increased motor preparation resulting from strong activation of the defense response cascade. In contrast, directed away threat stimuli likely activated the defense cascade, but less intensively, prompting immobility. Different threat stimuli produced varying effects, which was interpreted as evidence that the modulation of RT by emotional stimuli represents the summation of attentional and motivational effects. Additionally, participants who had been previously exposed to diverse types of violent crime were more strongly influenced by threat stimuli directed toward the observer. In sum, our data support the concept that emotions are indeed action tendencies.

Interactions between emotion and action in the brain

“…First, we did not observe clear support for a valence by context interaction pattern in the RT data. Whereas we observed a reduction in RT when performing a task in the directed towards context in our previous behavioral study (Fernandes et al, 2013), evidence for this modulation effect was modest here. This difference is possibly due to the smaller sample size used in the current fMRI study, which also compromises the statistical power to detect such interaction effects in a voxelwise analysis.…”

Decoding negative affect personality trait from patterns of brain activation to threat stimuli

“…Following this rationale, the directed-toward stimuli probably evoked a more consistent pattern of brain responses across participants, resulting in the failure of the regression model to predict the NA trait. A previous study by Fernandes et al (2013) showed that the threat directed toward the observer is considered as more intense, near, inescapable and with less possibility of hiding by the participants. Thus, it is likely that the increase in the magnitude of threat perception produced patterns of brain activities that were more homogeneous and less susceptible to individual variability.…”

Up speeds you down. Awe-evoking monumental buildings trigger behavioral and perceived freezing

“…However, also threatening man-made objects, such as firearms, have been found to trigger behavioral freezing (Fernandes et al, 2013). In research on human freezing, freezing has been found to be evident from bradycardia (i.e., decreased heart rate; Roelofs, Hagenaars, & Stins, 2010), decreased response times (Sagliano, Cappuccio, Trojano, & Conson, 2014;Fernandes et al, 2013), and also from decreased body sway (Roelofs, Hagenaars, & Stins, 2010).…”

“…Based on the finding that reduced response speed is a reliable indicator of freezing (cfr., Sagliano, Cappuccio, Trojano, & Conson, 2014;Fernandes et al, 2013) we operationalized freezing in terms of the speed with which participants clicked a series of radio buttons using their computer mouse. We expected that clicking radio buttons would be slowest in the face of the high building situated close-by.…”