Department of Psychology, Kingston University, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, Middlesex University, United Kingdom.
Behav Res Ther. 2017 Aug;95:1-18. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2017.05.002. Epub 2017 May 6.
Superior learning for fear-relevant stimuli is typically indicated in the laboratory by faster acquisition of fear responses, greater learned fear, and enhanced resistance to extinction. Three experiments investigated the speed, magnitude, and robustness of UK children's (6-10 years; N = 290; 122 boys, 168 girls) vicariously learned fear responses for three types of stimuli. In two experiments, children were presented with pictures of novel animals (Australian marsupials) and flowers (fear-irrelevant stimuli) alone (control) or together with faces expressing fear or happiness. To determine learning speed the number of stimulus-face pairings seen by children was varied (1, 10, or 30 trials). Robustness of learning was examined via repeated extinction procedures over 3 weeks. A third experiment compared the magnitude and robustness of vicarious fear learning for snakes and marsupials. Significant increases in fear responses were found for snakes, marsupials and flowers. There was no indication that vicarious learning for marsupials was faster than for flowers. Moreover, vicariously learned fear was neither greater nor more robust for snakes compared to marsupials, or for marsupials compared to flowers. These findings suggest that for this age group stimulus fear relevance may have little influence on vicarious fear learning.
对于与恐惧相关的刺激，优越的学习通常表现在实验室中，即更快地获得恐惧反应、更大的习得恐惧以及增强对消退的抵抗力。三个实验调查了 UK 儿童（6-10 岁；N=290；122 名男孩，168 名女孩）对三种类型的刺激的替代性习得恐惧反应的速度、程度和稳健性。在两个实验中，儿童单独（对照）或与表达恐惧或快乐的面孔一起观看陌生动物（澳大利亚有袋动物）和花卉（与恐惧无关的刺激）的图片。为了确定学习速度，儿童看到的刺激-面孔配对的数量有所不同（1、10 或 30 次试验）。通过 3 周的重复消退程序来检查学习的稳健性。第三个实验比较了蛇和有袋动物的替代性恐惧学习的程度和稳健性。对于蛇、有袋动物和花卉，恐惧反应都显著增加。没有迹象表明有袋动物的替代性学习比花卉更快。此外，与蛇相比，对于有袋动物，或与有袋动物相比，对于花卉，替代性习得的恐惧既不更大也不更稳健。这些发现表明，对于这个年龄组，刺激的恐惧相关性可能对替代性恐惧学习几乎没有影响。
