Neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli in animal-fearful individuals

Two experiments were conducted to explore neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli. Contingency assessments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from animal-fearful individuals during probabilistic classification learning in diverse motivational-affective contexts. As revealed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive, affective, & behavioral neuroscience affective, & behavioral neuroscience, 2005-12, Vol.5 (4), p.373-387
Main Authors: KOPP, Bruno, ALTMANN, René
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Amygdala - physiopathology
Animals
Anxiety disorders. Neuroses
Arousal - physiology
Association Learning - physiology
Attention - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Brain Mapping
Cerebral Cortex - physiopathology
Contingent Negative Variation
Emotions - physiology
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Fear & phobias
Fear - physiology
Female
Humans
Medical sciences
Mental Recall - physiology
Motivation
Nerve Net - physiopathology
Phobia
Phobic Disorders - physiopathology
Phobic Disorders - psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Snakes
Spiders
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Summary:Two experiments were conducted to explore neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli. Contingency assessments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from animal-fearful individuals during probabilistic classification learning in diverse motivational-affective contexts. As revealed by ERPs, attentional amplification of cortical sensory processing occurred in response to phobia-related stimuli. In particular, the posterior selection negativity in the ERPs to phobia-related stimuli had its origin in a bottom-up route, probably the amygdaloid-extrastriate cortex path. No evidence for top-down modulation of phobia-related attentional amplification was obtained. The covariation bias occurred only when aversive motivational-affective expectancies prevailed, suggesting a role of retrieval from associative emotional memory. Finally, phobia-related cue competition was probably related to the disruption of elaboration in memory of neutral and aversive stimulus pairings that was induced by belonging pairings of phobia-related and aversive stimuli. The findings have far-reaching implications for the interface between cognition and emotion.
ISSN:1530-7026
1531-135X
DOI:10.3758/CABN.5.4.373