Evaluative conditioning of fear and disgust in blood-injection-injury phobia: Specificity and impact of individual differences in disgust sensitivity
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were selected from undergraduate psychology classes based on their scores on the Injection Phobia Scale-Anxiety (IPS-Anx; Öst, Hellstrom, & Kaver, 1992) and participated in exchange for research credit. Based on their questionnaire score, participants were classified into two mutually exclusive groups.
The BII phobia group1
Participant characteristics
Scores for BII phobics on the IPS-Anx ranged from 36.00 to 66.00 (M = 45.50, S.D. = 8.23) and those for the non-phobics ranged from .00 to 19.00 (M = 4.87, S.D. = 3.78). Age and gender distributions did not significantly differ between the two groups (p > .05).
Validation of phobic group membership
A logistical regression analysis was performed using the Injections, Sharp Objects, Blood, Mutilation, and Examinations subscales of the MFS as predictor of phobic group status (BII phobic or non-phobic). A test of the full model with all five
Discussion
Fear and disgust are discrete emotional states characterized by well-defined physiological, behavioral, and subjective dimensions (Ekman, 1992). However, both emotions have been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of BII phobia (e.g., Kleinknecht, Thorndike, & Walls, 1996). This line of research has also shown that BII phobics tend to respond with a greater degree of disgust than fear when exposed to threat-relevant stimuli (Tolin, Sawchuk, & Lee, 1999). It has been proposed that disgust
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2015, Clinical Psychology ReviewCitation Excerpt :The robustness of the findings was supported in studies using self-evaluative and electrodermal recordings (Olatunji, Forsyth, & Cherian, 2007); psychophysiological assessment of facial muscles and heart rate (i.e., facial electromyogram and electrocardiogram respectively; Schienle et al., 2001), and other objective measures such as an affective priming task (Mason & Richardson, 2010). Moreover, findings have been supported in studies using student samples (Mason & Richardson, 2010; Olatunji, Forsyth, & Cherian, 2007), a blood-injury-injection (BII) phobic analogue sample (Olatunji, Lohr, Smits, Sawchuk, & Patten, 2009), clinical samples of BII phobics (Schienle, Schafer, Walter, Stark, & Vaitl, 2005), and spider phobics (Olatunji, 2006). de Houwer (2007) proposed that EC is best defined as an effect, as different kinds of CS–US relations produce evaluative conditioning.
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