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

Frontiers in Psychology

Carolina Pletti¹ 

关键词: gaze cuing;    snake phobia;    facial expression;    spatial attention;    emotion;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00454

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY