Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia , Germany.
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia , Germany.
Front Psychol. 2015 Feb 27;6:170. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00170. eCollection 2015.
The acoustic startle response (SR) has consistently been shown to be enhanced by fear-arousing cross-modal background stimuli in phobics. Intra-modal fear-potentiation of acoustic SR was rarely investigated and generated inconsistent results. The present study compared the acoustic SR to phobia-related sounds with that to phobia-related pictures in 104 dental phobic patients and 22 controls. Acoustic background stimuli were dental treatment noises and birdsong and visual stimuli were dental treatment and neutral control pictures. Background stimuli were presented for 4 s, randomly followed by the administration of the startle stimulus. In addition to SR, heart-rate (HR) was recorded throughout the trials. Irrespective of their content, background pictures elicited greater SR than noises in both groups with a trend for phobic participants to show startle potentiation to phobia-related pictures but not noises. Unlike controls, phobics showed HR acceleration to both dental pictures and noises. HR acceleration of the phobia group was significantly positively correlated with SR in the noise condition only. The acoustic SR to phobia-related noises is likely to be inhibited by prolonged sensorimotor gating.
听觉惊吓反应（SR）一直以来都被证明会被恐惧诱发的跨模态背景刺激所增强，在恐惧症患者中更是如此。很少有研究对模态内的听觉 SR 增强进行调查，而且得出的结果也不一致。本研究比较了 104 名牙科恐惧症患者和 22 名对照组对与恐惧症相关的声音和图片的听觉 SR。听觉背景刺激是牙科治疗噪音和鸟鸣声，视觉刺激是牙科治疗和中性控制图片。背景刺激呈现 4 秒，随机后给予惊吓刺激。除了 SR，整个试验过程中还记录了心率（HR）。无论其内容如何，背景图片在两组中都比噪音引起更大的 SR，而且有趋势表明恐惧症患者对与恐惧症相关的图片而非噪音产生惊吓增强。与对照组不同的是，恐惧症患者对牙齿图片和噪音都会引起心率加速。只有在噪音条件下，恐惧症组的 HR 加速与 SR 呈显著正相关。与恐惧症相关的噪音的听觉 SR 可能会被长时间的感觉运动门控所抑制。
