Gaze cuing of attention in snake phobic women: the influence of facial expression
- Author(s)
- Carolina Pletti, Mario Dalmaso, Michela Sarlo, Giovanni Galfano
- Abstract
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(s)
- External organisation(s)
- University of Padova
- Journal
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Volume
- 6
- ISSN
- 1664-1078
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00454
- Publication date
- 04-2015
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 501011 Cognitive psychology, 501006 Experimental psychology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Psychology
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/2db4c495-8e9c-4bea-b2cd-8d1811c81acb