Meyer Miriam Magdalena, Buchner Axel, Bell Raoul
Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany.
J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2016 Sep;71(5):831-40. doi: 10.1093/geronb/gbv016. Epub 2015 Mar 20.
The present study investigates age differences in the vulnerability to illusory correlations between fear-relevant stimuli and threatening information.
Younger and older adults saw pictures of threatening snakes and nonthreatening fish, paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information ("poisonous" and "nonpoisonous") with a null contingency between animal type and poisonousness. In a source monitoring test, participants were required to remember whether an animal was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. Illusory correlations were implicitly measured via a multinomial model. One advantage of this approach is that memory and guessing processes can be assessed independently. An illusory correlation would be reflected in a higher probability of guessing that a snake rather than a fish was poisonous if the poisonousness of the animal was not remembered.
Older adults showed evidence of illusory correlations in source guessing while younger adults did not; instead they showed evidence of probability matching. Moreover, snake fear was associated with increased vulnerability to illusory correlations in older adults.
The findings confirm that older adults are more susceptible to fear-relevant illusory correlations than younger adults.
本研究调查了与恐惧相关的刺激和威胁性信息之间虚幻关联易感性的年龄差异。
年轻和年长成年人观看威胁性蛇和非威胁性鱼的图片，并伴有威胁性和非威胁性背景信息（“有毒”和“无毒”），动物类型与毒性之间不存在实际关联。在一个源监测测试中，参与者需要记住一种动物是与毒性还是无毒相关联。虚幻关联通过多项式模型进行隐性测量。这种方法的一个优点是可以独立评估记忆和猜测过程。如果不记得动物的毒性，虚幻关联将反映在猜测蛇而不是鱼有毒的更高概率上。
年长成年人在源猜测中表现出虚幻关联的证据，而年轻成年人则没有；相反，他们表现出概率匹配的证据。此外，对蛇的恐惧与年长成年人中虚幻关联易感性增加有关。
研究结果证实，年长成年人比年轻成年人更容易受到与恐惧相关的虚幻关联的影响。
