Lexical Decision Paradigms do not Differentiate between Fearful and Non-fearful Individuals

Abstract

Thirty-two spider-fearful, 33 blood/injury/injection fearful, and 28 nonfearful individuals (N=93) participated in dual-task study. Participants were presented with blood, spider, neutral, positive and pseudo-word stimuli while having to also verbally identify numbers as either even or odd. Blood-fearful individuals responded slower than spider and non-fearful individuals. However, there was no interaction of group membership with stimuli type. This study replicates the results of two previous studies that have used a lexical decision task in an effort to differentiate between fearful and non-fearful individuals and found no significant differences between these two groups on this task. These results suggest that the lexical decision task in general may not be sensitive enough to elicit processing differences in non-clinical samples.Why do individuals with phobia respond differently to fear-inducing stimuli? Typically when we think of a phobic response to some feared stimuli (e.g. a spider) we think of an individual who shows fear through facial expression, overt behavior (e.g. screaming, tensing muscles), and even through avoidance. However, cognitive psychologists have also inquired into how a phobic individual might show a fear response that is less overt: do phobic individual process information about fearful stimuli in different patterns than non-phobic individuals? Several researchers have investigated this question and it is assumed that phobic individuals process fearinducing stimuli differently than those who are not phobic (Kindt and Brosschot 1998;Kindt et al. 1999;Rusted and Dighton 1991;Watts and Coyle 1992;Watts and Dagleish 1991). The hypothesized difference is that phobic individuals allocate more cognitive recourses to processing fear-inducing stimuli thus resulting in differences in processing speed of fear-inducing stimuli than those who are not fearful