Lexical decision task performance in blood-fearful and spider-fearful individuals

Ferraro, F. Richard; Christopherson, Kim; Douglas, Jason

doi:10.1007/s12144-006-1008-2

Cited by 5 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Aversive words, such as those related to a PTSD patient's trauma (McNally, English, & Lipke, 1993) or those related to one's specific phobia, affect cognitive processes similarly to taboo words (Watts, et al, 1986;Williams, et al, 1996), but there is little evidence to suggest that comprehension processes are affected by aversive meanings (Ferraro, Christopherson, & Douglas, 2006;Hill & Kemp-Wheeler, 1989). Aversive words gain their status after the word's meaning has become associated with psychological suffering, such as the word spider to someone with arachnophobia.…”

Section: Taboo Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentence processing of taboo words: Evidence from eyetracking

Nye¹,

Ferreira²

2017

Preprint

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The reported studies investigate online processing of taboo words (e.g. shit) and their censored equivalents (e.g. s**t), relative to semantically matched non-taboo words (e.g. junk). Participants' eyes were tracked as they read sentences which contained one of the critical words. In Experiment 1, participants also encountered censored-neutral words, known as masked (e.g. j**k), but in Experiment 2, participants only encountered the taboo, censored, and neutral conditions, thus manipulating the perceptual certainty of censored words. Taboo and neutral words required similar processing time across all reading measures; liberal post-hoc analyses replicated the null effect. With regards to the censored words, Experiment 1 revealed that early word-recognition requirements were similar between censored, taboo, and neutral words, with censored words requiring additional processing time in later sentence integration measures. However, the results from Experiment 2 revealed no differences in reading time between conditions, suggesting that the masked words in Experiment 1 motivated participants to doublecheck the censored words due to their orthographic similarity. After reading all of the sentences in Experiment 2, participants' memory of the sentences was tested. Participants were able to differentiate between whether they encountered a neutral or profane word (i.e. either taboo or censor), but participants were unable to identify the specific profane word that they encountered in the reading task. We argue that the results relating to the taboo words further clarifies language's role within the functional architecture of cognition while the results relating to censorship informs how statistical regularities of language are used to process lexical-semantic information.

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Section: Taboo Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentence processing of taboo words: Evidence from eyetracking

Nye¹,

Ferreira²

2017

Preprint

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“…Researchers have used the Stroop task (Chen et al 1996; Thorpe and Salkovskis 1997;van den Hout et al 1997;Watts et al 1986), word-stem completion (Sawchuk et al 1999), levels of processing tasks (Wenzel et al 2007), and lexical decision tasks (Ferraro et al 2006) to investigate processing differences. The majority of studies investigating processing differences between phobic and non-phobic individuals have utilized the Stroop task and these studies have consistently found slower reaction times for phobic individuals when presented with fear-inducing word stimuli (Chen et al 1996; Thorpe and Salkovskis 1997;van den Hout et al 1997;Watts et al 1986).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The use of the LDT has been used extensively in depression and anxiety research (Baldwin and Main 2001;Siegle et al 2002) and was later used by Ferraro et al (2006) and Christopherson and Ferraro (2009) to investigate processing differences between individuals who were spider fearful, blood/injury/injection fearful and non-fearful participants. Ferraro et al (2006) results indicated no significant differences in either reaction time or accuracy between these three groups. In a later study Christopherson and Ferraro (2009) included the use of word primes in the LDT and also found no significant differences between these two groups.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The present study was conducted to expand on Ferraro et al's (2006) and Christopherson and Ferraro (2009) experiments by using a dual-task paradigm with a LDT in an attempt to investigate if this type of measurement would be more sensitive in identifying processing differences between fearful and non-fearful individuals using the LDT. This study employed the same sampling technique as the previous studies by Ferraro et al (2006) and Christopherson and Ferraro (2009) recruiting blood-fearful, spider-fearful, and non-fearful participants and used the identical LDT with the addition of the dual task (in this case the participant had to verbally identify the corresponding number as odd or even). Based on previous results using this general method, it is predicted that fearful individuals will respond slower to fear inducing words than non-fearful individuals (Christopherson and Ferraro 2009;Ferraro et al 2006).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This study employed the same sampling technique as the previous studies by Ferraro et al (2006) and Christopherson and Ferraro (2009) recruiting blood-fearful, spider-fearful, and non-fearful participants and used the identical LDT with the addition of the dual task (in this case the participant had to verbally identify the corresponding number as odd or even). Based on previous results using this general method, it is predicted that fearful individuals will respond slower to fear inducing words than non-fearful individuals (Christopherson and Ferraro 2009;Ferraro et al 2006). Because cognitive processing and RT are influenced by the processing capacity available, the dual-task works to decrease RT by increasing cognitive load for the participant and also works as a way to control for any differences in the allocation of attention in both groups.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Christopherson

Ferraro

2009

Curr Psychol

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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

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Emotional context influences access of visual stimuli to anxious individuals’ awareness

Ruderman

Lamy

2012

Consciousness and Cognition

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Lexical decision task performance in blood-fearful and spider-fearful individuals

Cited by 5 publications

References 28 publications

Sentence processing of taboo words: Evidence from eyetracking

Sentence processing of taboo words: Evidence from eyetracking

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

Emotional context influences access of visual stimuli to anxious individuals’ awareness

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