Fear and Anxiety
Class 21
Final Exam Date and Time
Date:
Tuesday, May 14
Time:
11:45-2:45
Fear and Anxiety (Öhman Chapter)
Fear Thoughts
Something bad now, very soon
Physiology
Weak limbs, heart races, dry mouth
Behavior
Flee, desire to escape
Timing
Occurs post-stimulus
Anxiety Thoughts
Something bad in the future
Physiology
Tension
Behavior
Limited responses
Timing
Occurs pre-stimulus
Classes of Fear Inducing Situations
X
Interpersonal Threat (rejection, ostracism, shaming)
Mortality Fears (death, injury, illness, blood, surgery)
Fear of animals (domestics, small ones, bugs, reptiles)
Agoraphobic fear (open/closed spaces, traveling alone)
Which of these is greatest fear?
Evolutionary Basis for Fears
Social Fears
Fear of Rejection
Humans prey on humans
Mortality fears
Humans only species aware
of its own mortality
Animals
Predators
Disease agents
Agoraphobia
Separation fears, lost in open
space, lost in crowds
“Preparedness” as Evidence of
Evolutionary Basis for Fears
Which is the most scary?
Which is the most deadly?
Tarantula
Tarantula
Viper
Viper
Rat
Rat
1988 Chevy 4-door
X 1988 Chevy 4-door
Experimental Evidence of
Preparedness (Ohman et al., 1975)
UCR—Electric shock—paired with either
a. Conditionion phobic: Phobic stim (photo of snake)
b. Conditioning neutral: Neutral stim (photo of house)
OR,
c. Sensitize: Shocks only, but no pairing
OR,
d. Control: Photos only, no shocks
MEASURE: Skin conductance response (SCR)
QUESTION: How long for conditioned response (CS) to
extinguish (SCR lower) due to expt. condition (a-d)?
Extinction Rate of Conditioned Fear, When UCS
(Pain) Paired with Phobic or Neutral Stimuli
Phobic Stims (snakes)
Neutral Stims (houses)
0.7
0.7
0.6
0.6
0.5
0.5
0.4
Condition 0.4
Sensitize
CS Alone 0.3
0.3
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.1
0
0
5
lo
c
B
k
lo
c
k
4
3
B
B
lo
c
k
2
k
lo
c
B
B
lo
c
k
1
Block 1
Block 2 Block 3
Block 4 Block 5
Phun With Phobias
1. Chaetophobia
Fear of hair
2. Ephebophobia --
Fear of youths
3. Coulrophobia
Fear of clowns
4. Ergasiophobia
Fear of work
5. Gymnophobia
Fear of nudity
6. Parakavedkeatriaphobia Fear of Friday 13
7. Neophobia
Fear of newness
Stigma: Where fear, anger, and
humor intersect
Stigma—from “Stigmata”, a mark
Who are the stigmatized?
Those who violate social norms: Old, infirm, disfigured,
disabled, social outcast, criminal, “the other”
Reactions to the stigmatized?
Fear, anger, fascination, disgust, interest, anxiety, derision
Why the Strong Reactions to the
Stigmatized?
Learned : e.g., parents to young
Inborn : part of evolutionary make-up
a. Strong attack weak in hierarchical species
b. Immediate fear and loathing to dead animals
Reactions of Chimps to the Dead
and Disabled
Reactions to anesthetized chimps (Hebb & Thompson, 1954)
Reactions to paralyzed chimps (Goodall, 1971)
Emotional reactions?
Fear, anger, disgust, distain
Are responses to stigma always negative?
Compassion: Some chimps adopted the polio victims
Fascination: Curious about people, who violate norms.
a. “Freak shows”
b. Tourists to East Village
Admiration:
a. Glamour of the rebel, bad boy/girl
b. Respect for courage—Helen Keller
Ambivalence: Emotions that go strongly in two directions
at once—uncomfortable and powerful.
Stigmatized: Hyper-visible and invisible
Hyper-visible: Staring at the handicapped (Langer, et al. 1976)
Invisibility and being stigmatized?
Invisibility: People try to not see the stigmatized
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse
to see me. … it is as though I have been surrounded by
mirrors of hard, distorting glass. [People see] only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their
imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Panic Attacks: Characteristics
* Place people is full-blown terror mode
* Powerful sense of foreboding, fear, dread
* Physiologically arousing: heart, breathing, etc.
* Mental readiness for danger: Planning escape
Panic Attacks: Causes
1. Biologically-oriented: spontaneous, arise from bio-chemical
misfiring
2. Psychologists: precipitating thoughts and events, especially
separation-related: family strife, job-loss
3. Attack requires:
a. symptom sensitivity +
b. catastrophic cognitions +
c. preceding/concurrent negative events
4. Patients complain about meaning of panic
5. Panics are a vicious cycle: arousal --> cognitions --> arousal
How to manage panic attacks
1. Attacks last from 15-30 minutes
2. Knowing this allows people to wait it out
Hearing and Not Hearing Danger Signals:
December 7, 1941
Signal Detection: Where to err?
Danger
Present
Danger Not
Present
Sound Alarm
Hit
False
Positive
Don’t Alarm
False
Negative
Hit
X
Why Humans “Favor” False Alarms
Humans faced signal detection dilemma for millennia
Evolved in a highly dangerous world
Evolutionary lessons “learned” by psyche are that:
1. Defenses must activate quickly
2. Must activate at hint of threat, not at certainty
3. Threat registered with minimal cues
Le Doux's "Fear Loop": Direct link: auditory nuclei to amygdala.
Bypasses thalamo-cortical path.
Threat doesn’t require high-level analyses
Problem of Attention
1. Where to point the "radar dish", to best detect threat?
2. Timing: How do look at the right place AT THE
RIGHT TIME to find threats?
3. How do we do anything else, if we're focusing only on
threat?
Automatic vs. Controlled Info. Processing
Automatic
Controlled
Gross characteristics
Fine characteristics
Unconscious, voluntary
Conscious, directed
Can’t suppress/distract
Can suppress/distract
Parallel (several modes
at once).
Sequential (only one mode
at a time).
Does not require effort
Effortful
Can’t be observed by self
Can be observed by self
(introspection).
Automatic Processing and Threat Detection
Automatic, non-conscious mental activity gives us early
warning system for detecting threat
Implication: You can know and not know something at the
same time--not know it consciously, know it unconsciously
Ohman studies: show how this occurs
Basic technique: Backward masking
Backward Masking
1. Present picture of threatening stimulus very quickly (30
miiliseconds)
2. Immediately after threat pix is shown, show a nonthreatening picture. The second picture is a mask, blocks
first picture from consciousness.
3. Reaction to first (masked) picture indicates unconscious
processing
Automatic Processing of Fearful Stimuli (Ohman & Soares, 1994)
1. Pre-select:
Snake phobic, not spider phobic
Spider phobic, not snake phobic
Have no fear of spiders or snakes
2. Targets: photos of snakes, spiders, flowers, mushrooms
3. Masks: Cut-up/reassembled target photos
4. Show target photo for 30 milliseconds.
5. Show mask for 100 milliseconds
6. Later, show target without mask
7. Outcome measure: GSR—a measure of anxiety.
8. All subjects exposed to photos of snakes, spiders,
flowers, mushrooms in masked and, later, un-masked condition.
Skin Conductance Level
Automatic Processing of Fearful Stimuli:
Results of Masked Stimuli Only
0.4
0.3
Snakes
Spiders
Flowers
0.2
0.1
0
Snake
Phobic
Spider
Phobic
Control
Anxiety Primes Attention to Anxious Stimuli
Subjects: Trait anxious vs. normal controls
Auditory shadowing task
* Attended ear – listens to story
* Dis-attended ear -- threat words (kill, hate, disease)
-- Neutral words (juice, table, leaf)
Visual probes:
Press “J” for names, “F” for foods
Question: RT for vis. probes affected by threat/neutral words?
Reaction Time to Visual Prompts
Idealized Results of Shadowing Study
0.4
Threat Words
Neutral Words
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
Anxious
Controls
Implication: Trait anxiety  heightened sensitivity to threat.