Recognizing masked threat: Fear betrays, but disgust you can trust.

Abstract

If emotions guide consciousness, people may recognize degraded objects in center view more accurately if they either fear the objects or are disgusted by them. Therefore, we studied whether recognition of spiders and snakes correlates with individual differences in spider fear, snake fear, and disgust sensitivity. Female students performed a recognition task with pictures of spiders, snakes, flowers, and mushrooms as well as blanks. Pictures were backward masked to reduce picture visibility. Signal detection analyses showed that recognition of spiders and snakes was correlated with disgust sensitivity but not with fear of spiders or snakes. Further, spider fear correlated with the tendency to misinterpret blanks as threatening (response bias). These findings suggest that effects on recognition and response biases to emotional pictures vary for different emotions and emotional traits. Whereas fear may induce response biases, disgust may facilitate recognition.

Disgust-specific modulation of early attention processes

“…It furthermore fits with the notion that disgust is associated with a general motivation to narrow attention (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010) and it runs parallel with the recent finding that disgusting images are also better remembered than frightening ones (Chapman et al, 2013;Croucher, Calder, Ramponi, Barnard, & Murphy, 2011). Moreover, Wiens, Peira, Golkar, and Öhman (2008) reported that while fear produced a response bias in a masked-threat study (i.e., more false alarms), disgust improved the actual recognition of these images. Hence the fitting subtitle of their study "fear betrays, but disgust you can trust" (p. 810).…”

Brain dynamics of upstream perceptual processes leading to visual object recognition: A high density ERP topographic mapping study

“…On the other hand, we did not find any significant modulation of these effects by the emotional content of the scene, suggesting a common visual object recognition mechanism for neutral, pleasant and unpleasant pictures during this specific time interval. A possible reason may be that our pre-selected IAPS stimuli were only mildly arousing, in contrast with many previous studies in literature showing reliable visual ERP effects with highly arousing pictures (including the EPN and LPP components, recorded following stimulus onset), relative to neutral, or low arousing scenes (Delplanque et al, 2004;Junghöfer, Bradley, Elbert, & Lang, 2001;Peyk, Schupp, Keil, Elbert, & Junghöfer, 2009;Schupp, Junghöfer, Weike, & Hamm, 2003a;Schupp et al, 2003b;Schupp et al, 2006;Wiens, Peira, Golkar, & Ohman, 2008). In addition, given the specific data analysis used in our study, we cannot rule out Brain Dynamics of Upstream Perceptual Processes 31 the possibility that these neural processes might be triggered with some delay for emotional compared to neutral pictures, an issue that requires further research.…”

Emotional responses in spider fear are closely related to picture awareness

“…Spider and flower target pictures and mask pictures were the same as in a previous study (Wiens, Peira, Golkar, & Ö hman, 2008). Target pictures consisted of 40 spiders and 40 flowers.…”