March David S, Gaertner Lowell, Olson Michael A
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL USA.
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN USA.
Affect Sci. 2022 Jan 7;3(1):135-144. doi: 10.1007/s42761-021-00090-6. eCollection 2022 Mar.
A neural architecture that preferentially processes immediate survival threats relative to other negatively and positively valenced stimuli presumably evolved to facilitate survival. The empirical literature on threat superiority, however, has suffered two problems: methodologically distinguishing threatening stimuli from negative stimuli and differentiating whether responses are sped and strengthened by threat superiority or delayed and diminished by conscious processing of nonthreatening stimuli. We addressed both problems in three within-subject studies that compared responses to empirically validated sets of threating, negative, positive, and neutral stimuli, and isolated threat superiority from the opposing effect of conscious attention by presenting stimuli outside conscious perception. Consistent with threat superiority, threatening stimuli elicited stronger skin-conductance (Study 1), startle-eyeblink (Study 2), and more negative downstream evaluative responses (Study 3) relative to the undifferentiated responses to negative, positive, and neutral stimuli.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00090-6.
一种相对于其他具有负性和正性效价的刺激优先处理即时生存威胁的神经结构，大概是为了促进生存而进化出来的。然而，关于威胁优势的实证文献存在两个问题：在方法上区分威胁性刺激和负性刺激，以及区分反应是因威胁优势而加快和增强，还是因对非威胁性刺激的有意识加工而延迟和减弱。我们在三项被试内研究中解决了这两个问题，这些研究比较了对经实证验证的威胁性、负性、正性和中性刺激集的反应，并通过在意识知觉之外呈现刺激，将威胁优势与有意识注意的相反效应区分开来。与威胁优势一致，相对于对负性、正性和中性刺激的无差异反应，威胁性刺激引发了更强的皮肤电传导（研究1）、惊跳眨眼（研究2）以及更负性的下游评价反应（研究3）。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s42761-021-00090-6获取的补充材料。
