Gaze cuing of attention in snake phobic women: the influence of facial expression

Autor(en)

Carolina Pletti, Mario Dalmaso, Michela Sarlo, Giovanni Galfano

Abstrakt

Only a few studies investigated whether animal phobics exhibit attentional biases in contexts where no phobic stimuli are present. Among these, recent studies provided evidence for a bias toward facial expressions of fear and disgust in animal phobics. Such findings may be due to the fact that these expressions could signal the presence of a phobic object in the surroundings. To test this hypothesis and further investigate attentional biases for emotional faces in animal phobics, we conducted an experiment using a gaze-cuing paradigm in which participants' attention was driven by the task-irrelevant gaze of a centrally presented face. We employed dynamic negative facial expressions of disgust, fear and anger and found an enhanced gaze-cuing effect in snake phobics as compared to controls, irrespective of facial expression. These results provide evidence of a general hypervigilance in animal phobics in the absence of phobic stimuli, and indicate that research on specific phobias should not be limited to symptom provocation paradigms.

Organisation(en)

Externe Organisation(en)

Università degli Studi di Padova

Journal

Frontiers in Psychology

Band

6

ISSN

1664-1078

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00454

Publikationsdatum

04-2015

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

501011 Kognitionspsychologie, 501006 Experimentalpsychologie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Psychologie

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/2db4c495-8e9c-4bea-b2cd-8d1811c81acb