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Disgust and fear in detection performance and response biases to threat pictures

Cognitive theories claim that phobias involve unconscious processing and that anxious individuals search the environment for threatening stimuli and therefore detect them more rapidly. However, evidence for this is mixed and suggests that anxious individuals do not detect threat more accurately but are more liberal to report that they detected threat even if there was no actual threat (response bias). In this study, 55 women performed a detection task with pictures of snakes, spiders, and guns. The pictures were backward masked to reduce their visibility. Participants also filled in questionnaires that assessed their fear and disgust. As found in previous studies, detection performance did not correlate with fear. However, inconsistent with previous results, disgust sensitivity correlated with lower detection performance of snakes, and response biases varied with fear of spiders or snakes. These findings provide mixed support for notions of relationships between fear and disgust in threat detection.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-6964
Date January 2007
CreatorsJohansson, Moa
PublisherStockholms universitet, Psykologiska institutionen
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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