Wong Alex H K, Lovibond Peter F
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales.
Emotion. 2021 Jun;21(4):856-870. doi: 10.1037/emo0000739. Epub 2020 Mar 30.
Pavlovian conditioning studies have shown that humans can generalize conditioned fear to novel stimuli that are categorically related to the threat cue, despite perceptual dissimilarities. The current work examined the role of trait anxiety in the generalization of fear to categorically related objects. Items from 1 category, breakfast or bakery, were paired with shock whereas items from the other category were not. Participants were then tested on ambiguous cross-classified items-those that fitted in both the threat and safe categories. No trait anxiety effect was found in generalization to novel stimuli that clearly belonged to either the threat or the safe category in either shock expectancy ratings or skin conductance. In contrast, trait anxious individuals showed a bias toward higher threat appraisal to the ambiguous cross-classified stimuli. However, this pattern was not due to trait anxious individuals being more likely to perceive ambiguous items as belonging to the threat category. Instead they appear to display a bias toward overestimation of threat when the threat level is ambiguous. The current findings indicate that threat ambiguity modulates the effect of trait anxiety on categorical fear generalization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
巴甫洛夫条件反射研究表明，尽管存在感知上的差异，但人类能够将条件性恐惧泛化到与威胁线索在类别上相关的新刺激上。当前的研究考察了特质焦虑在恐惧向类别相关物体泛化中的作用。来自一个类别的物品，如早餐或烘焙食品，与电击配对，而来自另一个类别的物品则不与电击配对。然后，对参与者进行模棱两可的交叉分类物品测试，即那些既属于威胁类别又属于安全类别的物品。在电击预期评分或皮肤电导率方面，对于明确属于威胁或安全类别的新刺激的泛化中，未发现特质焦虑效应。相比之下，特质焦虑个体对模棱两可的交叉分类刺激表现出更高威胁评估的倾向。然而，这种模式并非由于特质焦虑个体更有可能将模棱两可的物品视为属于威胁类别。相反，当威胁水平模棱两可时，他们似乎表现出高估威胁的倾向。当前的研究结果表明，威胁的模糊性调节了特质焦虑对类别恐惧泛化的影响。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2021美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
