Psychometric description of some specific-fear questionnaires

Klorman, Rafael; Weerts, Theodore C.; Hastings, James E.; Melamed, Barbara G.; Lang, Peter

doi:10.1016/s0005-7894(74)80008-0

Cited by 708 publications

(478 citation statements)

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“…All participants were screened by a self-report questionnaire for history of neurological and psychiatric illness, substance abuse, current psychotropic medication use, and for depression by the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck et al 1961). Although no participant reported a specific phobia of snakes or spiders, individuals who scored within two SD's of the phobic norms on questionnaires assessing attitudes toward snakes and spiders were categorized as "fearful" for the purposes of this study (Klorman et al 1974). Following Aron and colleagues (2004), individuals who did not score above chance after the first 50 trials were not included in the data analyses ("nonlearners").…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear relevancy, strategy use, and probabilistic learning of cue-outcome associations

Thomas¹,

LaBar²

2008

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The goal of this study was to determine how the fear relevancy of outcomes during probabilistic classification learning affects behavior and strategy use. Novel variants of the "weather prediction" task were created, in which cue cards predicted either looming fearful or neutral outcomes in a between-groups design. Strategy use was examined by goodness-of-fit estimates of response patterns across trial blocks to mathematical models of simple, complex, and nonidentifiable strategies. Participants in the emotional condition who were fearful of the outcomes had greater skin conductance responses compared with controls and performed worse, used suboptimal strategies, and had less insight into the predictive cue features during initial learning. In contrast, nonfearful participants in the emotional condition used more optimal strategies than the other groups by the end of the two training days. Results have implications for understanding how individual differences in fear relevancy alter the impact of emotion on feedback-based learning.Learning from emotional experiences is an important survival skill across species. Environmental contingencies predicting negative or positive outcomes provide key information useful for assessing the motivational value of selected actions and to assist decision-making processes in guiding future behavior. One form of contingency learning involves the gradual acquisition of cueoutcome associations guided by feedback (procedural or habit learning) (Mishkin et al. 1984). While much research has examined the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this form of learning, the influence of emotion has not been systematically addressed as it has for other domains of memory (LaBar and Cabeza 2006). Here we examine how individual differences in fear relevancy modulate behavioral performance and strategy use on a probabilistic classification learning (PCL) task that involves trial-and-error learning of associations between cues and outcomes that vary in emotional salience.In the standard version of a PCL task (the "weather prediction" task) (Knowlton et al. 1994), participants predict the weather in a foreign city (rain or sunshine) based on the presence of a combination of four cue cards. Across training, participants learn to probability match the appearance of the cue cards by choosing the outcome with the same probability that they are reinforced. Given that individuals tend to have little insight into their performance, there has been interest in characterizing the underlying response patterns, or strategies used to solve the task. To accomplish this objective, each participant's data is mathematically modeled across trial blocks to determine the goodness-of-fit to an "ideal" responder following particular response patterns. Least-mean-square estimates indicate that participants use at least three classes of strategies varying in optimality: (1) no identifiable strategy, (2) simple strategies involving the use of one cue to make predictions, and (3) complex strategies involving the use o...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear relevancy, strategy use, and probabilistic learning of cue-outcome associations

Thomas¹,

LaBar²

2008

Learn. Mem.

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“…Toward this end, we next investigated college students with high scores on the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (Meyer, Miller, Metzger, & Borkovec, 1990) and another group with high scores on a combined snake (SNAQ) and spider (SPQ) questionnaire (Klorman, Hastings, Weerts, Melamed, & Lang, 1974). High worriers display generalized anxiety, and high SNAQ/SPQ subjects show evidence of specific phobia.…”

Section: The Significance Of Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The way of our errors: Theme and variations

2010

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Negative feedback, either internal or external, is a fundamental guide to human learning and performance. The neural system that underlies the monitoring of performance and the adjustment of behavior has been subject to multiple neuroimaging investigations that uniformly implicate the anterior cingulate cortex and other prefrontal structures as crucial to these executive functions. The present article describes a series of experiments that employed event-related potentials to study a variety of processes associated with internal or external feedback. Three medial-frontal negativities (error-related negativity, correct-response negativity, feedback-related negativity) are highlighted, each of which plays an important role in the monitoring and dynamic adjustment of behavior. Extensions of basic research on these ERPs to questions relevant to clinical-science are also provided.

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“…The remaining 89 subjects (30 female; mean age + SEM: 19.05 + 0.1; age range 18-23) were randomly assigned to the conceptually similar, conceptually unrelated, or conceptually mismatched conditions. Subjects completed the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; Spielberger 1983) and a questionnaire assessing attitudes toward spiders (Klorman et al 1974) and wasps. The wasp questionnaire was a slightly modified version of the validated spider questionnaire.…”

Section: Conceptual Fear Generation Wwwlearnmemorgmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual similarity promotes generalization of higher order fear learning

Dunsmoor¹,

White²,

LaBar³

2011

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We tested the hypothesis that conceptual similarity promotes generalization of conditioned fear. Using a sensory preconditioning procedure, three groups of subjects learned an association between two cues that were conceptually similar, unrelated, or mismatched. Next, one of the cues was paired with a shock. The other cue was then reintroduced to test for fear generalization, as measured by the skin conductance response. Results showed enhanced fear generalization that correlated with trait anxiety levels in the group that learned an association between conceptually similar stimuli. These findings suggest that conceptual representations of conditional stimuli influence human fear learning processes.The idea that many fears originate from an association between neutral and aversive stimuli has continued to serve as the basis for influential accounts of human anxiety disorders (Bouton 2002;Mineka and Zinbarg 2006). However, the nexus of many fears defy a straightforward explanation, since following an aversive experience other stimuli that are indirectly related to the experience oftentimes become feared as well. In some cases, generalizing an acquired fear following an emotional learning episode is predicated on an association between stimuli formed before the emotional experience occurred. This form of stimulus generalization is known as sensory preconditioning (SPC) (Brogden 1939;Kimmel 1977;Gewirtz and Davis 2000), and is an important process whereby the representation of a known stimulus is modified following a salient experience with a related stimulus.A typical SPC procedure occurs in three phases: first, subjects learn to associate two neutral cues-for example, a bell and a light. Next, one of the cues, say the light, is associated with a biologically significant unconditioned stimulus (US), which leads to the development of a conditioned response (CR). The bell is called the preconditioned stimulus (PS) and the light is called the conditioned stimulus (CS). Finally, the PS is presented alone. Despite the fact that it has never predicted the US directly, the PS will often elicit a CR, suggesting that an association was formed during preconditioning between the PS and CS. The majority of SPC studies have been conducted in nonhuman animals (Brogden 1939;Rizley and Rescorla 1972). SPC effects have also been reported in a small number of human fear-conditioning experiments (White and Davey 1989;Vansteenwegen et al. 2000), but human research on this topic is very limited relative to experiments using first-order Pavlovian conditioning procedures. Consequently, the features that promote fear generalization between previously associated stimuli are unknown.A well-known factor important for classical conditioning (Rescorla and Furrow 1977) and stimulus generalization overall is similarity to the CS (Pavlov 1927;McLaren and Mackintosh 2002). Classic experiments of stimulus generalization in animals (reviewed in Honig and Urcuioli 1981) have revealed orderly generalization gradients of conditioned responses that tra...

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Psychometric description of some specific-fear questionnaires

Cited by 708 publications

References 7 publications

Fear relevancy, strategy use, and probabilistic learning of cue-outcome associations

Fear relevancy, strategy use, and probabilistic learning of cue-outcome associations

The way of our errors: Theme and variations

Conceptual similarity promotes generalization of higher order fear learning

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