Exploring the Structure of Human Defensive Responses from Judgments of Threat Scenarios.

ABSTRACT: How humans react to threats is a topic of broad theoretical importance, and also relevant for understanding anxiety disorders. Many animal threat reactions exhibit a common structure, a finding supported by human evaluations of written threat scenarios that parallel patterns of rodent defensive behavior to actual threats. Yet the factors that underlie these shared behavioral patterns remain unclear. Dimensional accounts rooted in Darwin's conception of antithesis explain many defensive behaviors. Across species, it is also clear that defensive reactions depend on specific situational factors, a feature long emphasized by psychological appraisal theories. Our study sought to extend prior investigations of human judgments of threat to a broader set of threats, including natural disasters, th

SUBMITTER: Harrison LA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4546605 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature