Journal
EMOTION
Volume 8, Issue 1, Pages 96-103Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/1528-3542.8.1.96
Keywords
emotional faces; fear conditioning; skin conductance responses; emotion
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Funding
- NIMH NIH HHS [1R01 MH071589, R01 MH071589, R01 MH071589-03] Funding Source: Medline
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How does the affective significance of emotional faces affect perceptual decisions? We manipulated affective significance by pairing 100% fearful faces with aversive electrical stimulation and hypothesized that increasing the significance of a stimulus via its prior history would lead to enhanced processing. After fear conditioning, participants viewed graded emotional faces that ranged from neutral to fearful. Faces were shown either in a color that was previously paired with shock or a color not paired with shock during conditioning. Increases in the frequency of fearful responses for faces shown in the shock-paired color were most robust for faces at intermediate intensity levels (40-60% fearful). Psychometric fits to the data revealed significant increased sensitivity for shock-paired relative to impaired faces. Thus, despite identical physical features for shock-paired and impaired stimuli (aside from the color, which was counterbalanced), more frequent (and faster) fearful responses were made when participants viewed affectively significant stimuli.
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