Some animal specific fears are more specific than others: Evidence from attention and emotion measures
Section snippets
Participants
Sixty female individuals, ranging in age from 18 to 38 years (M = 23.63; SD = 6.05), participated in the experiment. All participants had a high school degree and were students at the Superior Institute of Leiria, Portugal, where they were recruited in classes at several departments. Participants were selected from 281 individuals according to their scores on a Portuguese version of the Snake Phobia (SNAQ) and Spider Phobia (SPQ) questionnaires (Klorman, Weerts, Hastings, Melamed, & Lang, 1974
Reaction time data
The analysis showed that, overall, participants were significantly faster in detecting fear-relevant (i.e., spiders and snakes) than neutral target stimuli (i.e., mushrooms), F (2, 114) = 337.4, p < .0001, ηp2 = .86. A post hoc Tukey test revealed significant differences in detection latencies between all the three types of stimulus, with spider targets being detected faster, followed by snake and mushroom targets (see Table 1).
As shown in Fig. 2, this advantage was stable across the displays
Discussion
In the present study we examined two basic hypotheses: (a) fear-relevant stimuli have a processing advantage in relation to neutral, non-fear-relevant stimuli, and (b) this advantage is enhanced in individuals who report high fear of such stimuli. Using a visual search procedure, participants searched for a discrepant picture that could either be fear-relevant (snake or spider) or neutral (mushroom) in displays with a constant neutral background (fruits). The results provided at least partial
Acknowledgments
Sandra Soares was supported by grant SFRH/19513/2004 from the Foundation of Science and Technology, from the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education to pursue her Ph.D studies at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. This grant was co-financed by The Operational Program of Science and Innovation 2010 and the European Social Funding. The research was supported by an award as a Leading Scientist to Arne Öhman from the Swedish Research Council, and by a grant to Arne
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