Generalization of conditioned fear along a dimension of increasing positive valence.

ABSTRACT: The amount of fear evoked by potential threats is oftentimes proportional to the overlap in shared features with known threats. An adaptive learning system should therefore extract relevant features from threat stimuli to successfully detect other novel threats in the environment. But what if the most relevant feature of a threat stimulus is emotionally positive? Here, we used Pavlovian fear conditioning to ask whether people extract positive emotional features of a fear conditioned stimulus (CS) to selectively generalize to other stimuli that contain positive features. In a between subjects design, we first paired a picture of a face expressing either a slight amount of happiness or fear with an electrical shock to the wrist. We then tested fear generalization to modified face stimuli of

SUBMITTER: McClay M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7704714 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature