Is Acquired Disgust More Difficult to Extinguish Than Acquired Fear? an Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

This study used the classical conditioned acquisition and extinction paradigm to compare which of the two emotions, acquired disgust and acquired fear, was more difficult to extinguish, based on behavioral assessments and the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Behavioral assessments revealed that, following successful conditioned extinction, acquired disgust was more difficult to extinguish. The ERP results showed that, at the early stage of P1, the amplitude of conditioned fear was significantly smaller than that of conditioned disgust, and both were significantly different from the amplitude under neutral conditions; at the middle stage of N2, the difference between the amplitudes of conditioned disgust and conditioned fear disappeared, but they were still significantly different from the amplitudes of conditioned neutral stimuli; at the late stage of P3, the difference between conditioned disgust and conditioned neutral stimuli disappeared, but the difference between conditioned fear and neutral stimuli remained, suggesting that acquired fear was more difficult to extinguish than acquired disgust in terms of how the brain works.

A comparative study of the attentional blink of facial expression in deaf and hearing children

“…In a study by Carretié et al (2011) , subjectively rated disgust and fear-evoking images were used to assess valence and arousal; normal participants aged 19 to 30 years performed relatively worse for numerical categorization tasks when presented with disgust-evoking images. Zeng and Zheng (2019) also found that aversive stimuli attracted more attention resources, and normal participants aged 17 to 24 years with high aversive sensitivity showed higher attentional bias to all stimuli, suggesting that it was more difficult to disengage from disgust than from fear. In a study by Cisler et al (2009) where the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm was used, normal participants aged 18 to 21 years were found to have more difficulty in attentional disengagement from aversive words.…”