Effect of vicarious fear learning on children's heart rate responses and attentional bias for novel animals.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Reynolds G
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4170822 | biostudies-other | 2014 Oct
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Similar Datasets
Project description:Empathy and vicarious learning of fear are increasingly understood as separate phenomena, but the interaction between the two remains poorly understood. We investigated how social (vicarious) fear learning is affected by empathic appraisals by asking participants to either enhance or decrease their empathic responses to another individual (the demonstrator), who received electric shocks paired with a predictive conditioned stimulus. A third group of participants received no appraisal instructions and responded naturally to the demonstrator. During a later test, participants who had enhanced their empathy evinced the strongest vicarious fear learning as measured by skin conductance responses to the conditioned stimulus in the absence of the demonstrator. Moreover, this effect was augmented in observers high in trait empathy. Our results suggest that a demonstrator's expression can serve as a "social" unconditioned stimulus (US), similar to a personally experienced US in Pavlovian fear conditioning, and that learning from a social US depends on both empathic appraisals and the observers' stable traits.
| S-EPMC6053030 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Vicarious learning, i.e. learning through observing others rather than through one's own experiences, is an integral skill of social species. The aim of this study was to assess the causal role of affect sharing, an important aspect of empathy, in vicarious fear learning. N = 39 participants completed a vicarious Pavlovian fear conditioning paradigm. In the learning stage, they watched another person-the demonstrator-responding with distress when receiving electric shocks to a color cue (conditioned stimulus; CS+; a different color served as CS-). In the subsequent test stage, an increased skin conductance response (SCR) to the CS+ presented in the absence of the demonstrator indexed vicarious fear learning. Each participant completed this paradigm under two different hypnotic suggestions, which were administered to induce high or low affect sharing with the demonstrator in the learning stage, following a counterbalanced within-subject design. In the learning stage, high affect sharing resulted in stronger unconditioned SCR, increased eye gaze toward the demonstrator's face, and higher self-reported unpleasantness while witnessing the demonstrator's distress. In the test stage, participants showed a stronger conditioned fear response (SCR) when they had learned under high, compared to low, affect sharing. In contrast, participants' declarative memory of how many shocks the demonstrator had received with each cue was not influenced by the affect sharing manipulation. These findings demonstrate that affect sharing is involved in enhancing vicarious fear learning, and thus advance our understanding of the role of empathy, and more generally emotion, in social observational learning.
| S-EPMC9674158 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Disgust is a protective emotion associated with certain types of animal fears. Given that a primary function of disgust is to protect against harm, increasing children's disgust-related beliefs for animals may affect how threatening they think animals are and their avoidance of them. One way that children's disgust beliefs for animals might change is via vicarious learning: by observing others responding to the animal with disgust. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7-10 years) were presented with images of novel animals together with adult faces expressing disgust. Children's fear beliefs and avoidance preferences increased for these disgust-paired animals compared with unpaired control animals. Experiment 2 used the same procedure and compared disgust vicarious learning with vicarious learning with fear faces. Children's fear beliefs and avoidance preferences for animals again increased as a result of disgust vicarious learning, and animals seen with disgust or fear faces were also rated more disgusting than control animals. The relationship between increased fear beliefs and avoidance preferences for animals was mediated by disgust for the animals. The experiments demonstrate that children can learn to believe that animals are disgusting and threatening after observing an adult responding with disgust toward them. The findings also suggest a bidirectional relationship between fear and disgust with fear-related vicarious learning leading to increased disgust for animals and disgust-related vicarious learning leading to increased fear and avoidance.
| S-EPMC4120976 | biostudies-other
Project description:Observing pain in others facilitates self-pain in the observer. Vicarious pain facilitation mechanisms are poorly understood. We scanned 21 subjects while they observed pain, fear and neutral dynamic facial expressions. In 33% of the trials, a noxious electrical stimulus was delivered. The nociceptive flexion reflex (NFR) and pain ratings were recorded. Both pain and fear expressions increased self-pain ratings (fear > pain) and the NFR amplitude. Enhanced response to self-pain following pain and fear observation involves brain regions including the insula (INS) (pain > fear in anterior part), amygdala, mid-cingulate cortex (MCC), paracentral lobule, precuneus, supplementary motor area and pre-central gyrus. These results are consistent with the motivational priming account where vicarious pain facilitation involves a global enhancement of pain-related responses by negatively valenced stimuli. However, a psychophysiological interaction analysis centered on the left INS revealed increased functional connectivity with the aMCC in response to the painful stimulus following pain observation compared to fear. The opposite connectivity pattern (fear > pain) was observed in the fusiform gyrus, cerebellum (I-IV), lingual gyrus and thalamus, suggesting that pain and fear expressions influence pain-evoked brain responses differentially. Distinctive connectivity patterns demonstrate a stronger effect of pain observation in the cingulo-insular network, which may reflect partly overlapping networks underlying the representation of pain in self and others.
| S-EPMC9949570 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Children with specific learning disorders (SLDs) face a unique set of socio-emotional challenges as a result of their academic difficulties. Although a higher prevalence of anxiety in children with SLD is often reported, there is currently no research on cognitive mechanisms underlying this anxiety. One way to elucidate these mechanisms is to investigate attentional bias to threatening stimuli using a dot-probe paradigm. Our study compared children ages 9-16 with SLD (n = 48) to typically-developing (TD) controls (n = 33) on their attentional biases to stimuli related to general threats, reading, and stereotypes of SLD. We found a significant threat bias away from reading-related stimuli in the SLD, but not TD group. This attentional bias was not observed with the general threat and stereotype stimuli. Further, children with SLD reported greater anxiety compared to TD children. These results suggest that children with SLD experience greater anxiety, which may partially stem from reading specifically. The finding of avoidance rather than vigilance to reading stimuli indicates the use of more top-down attentional control. This work has important implications for therapeutic approaches to anxiety in children with SLD and highlights the need for attention to socio-emotional difficulties in this population. Future research is needed to further investigate the cognitive aspects of socio-emotional difficulties in children with SLD, as well as how this may impact academic outcomes.
| S-EPMC6639079 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe eye region of the face is particularly relevant for decoding threat-related signals, such as fear. However, it is unclear if gaze patterns to the eyes can be influenced by fear learning. Previous studies examining gaze patterns in adults find an association between anxiety and eye gaze avoidance, although no studies to date examine how associations between anxiety symptoms and eye-viewing patterns manifest in children. The current study examined the effects of learning and trait anxiety on eye gaze using a face-based fear conditioning task developed for use in children.MethodsParticipants were 82 youth from a general population sample of twins (aged 9-13 years), exhibiting a range of anxiety symptoms. Participants underwent a fear conditioning paradigm where the conditioned stimuli (CS+) were two neutral faces, one of which was randomly selected to be paired with an aversive scream. Eye tracking, physiological, and subjective data were acquired. Children and parents reported their child's anxiety using the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders.ResultsConditioning influenced eye gaze patterns in that children looked longer and more frequently to the eye region of the CS+ than CS- face; this effect was present only during fear acquisition, not at baseline or extinction. Furthermore, consistent with past work in adults, anxiety symptoms were associated with eye gaze avoidance. Finally, gaze duration to the eye region mediated the effect of anxious traits on self-reported fear during acquisition.ConclusionsAnxiety symptoms in children relate to face-viewing strategies deployed in the context of a fear learning experiment. This relationship may inform attempts to understand the relationship between pediatric anxiety symptoms and learning.
| S-EPMC9673016 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Statistical knowledge of a target's location may benefit visual search, and rapidly understanding the changes in regularity would increase the adaptability in visual search situations where fast and accurate performance is required. The current study tested the sources of statistical knowledge-explicitly-given instruction or experience-driven learning-and whether they affect the speed and location spatial attention is guided. Participants performed a visual search task with a statistical regularity to bias one quadrant ("old-rich" condition) in the training phase, followed by another quadrant ("new-rich" condition) in the switching phase. The "instruction" group was explicitly instructed on the regularity, whereas the "no-instruction" group was not. It was expected that the instruction group would rely on goal-driven attention (using regularities with explicit top-down knowledge), and the no-instruction group would rely on habit-like attention (learning regularities through repetitive experiences) in visual search. Compared with the no-instruction group, the instruction group readjusted spatial attention following the regularity switch more rapidly. The instruction group showed greater attentional bias toward the new-rich quadrant than the old-rich quadrant; however, the no-instruction group showed a similar extent of attentional bias to two rich quadrants. The current study suggests that the source of statistical knowledge can affect attentional allocation. Moreover, habit-like attention, a different type of attentional source than goal-driven attention, is relatively implicit and inflexible.
| S-EPMC9206057 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Prior experiments with children across seven different societies have indicated U-shaped age patterns in the likelihood of copying majority demonstrations. It is unclear which learning strategies underlie the observed responses that create these patterns. Here we broaden the understanding of children's learning strategies by: (1) exploring social learning patterns among 6-13-year-olds (n = 270) from ethnolinguistically varied communities in Vanuatu; (2) comparing these data with those reported from other societies (n = 629), and (3) re-analysing our and previous data based on a theoretically plausible set of underlying strategies using Bayesian methods. We find higher rates of social learning in children from Vanuatu, a country with high linguistic and cultural diversity. Furthermore, our results provide statistical evidence for modest U-shaped age patterns for a more clearly delineated majority learning strategy across the current and previously investigated societies, suggesting that the developmental mechanisms structuring majority bias are cross-culturally highly recurrent and hence a fundamental feature of early human social learning.
| S-EPMC9038790 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Individuals with high anxiety preferentially focus attention on emotional information. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) plays an important role in modulating both anxiety and attentional processes. Despite many studies having evaluated attentional bias in anxious people, few of them have investigated the change blindness phenomenon associated with the attentional response toward salient stimuli, considering the role of the ANS. This study aimed to examine the role of heart rate variability (HRV) in trait anxiety and top-down and bottom-up attentional processes toward emotional stimuli. Seventy-five healthy university students were divided into high (N = 39) and low (N = 36) trait anxiety groups and completed a change detection flicker task with neutral, positive, and negative stimuli. The results evidenced a different attentional pattern between people with high and low anxiety considering both the two attentional processes and the valence of the stimuli. Specifically, individuals with high anxiety showed a bias in elaborating emotional stimuli related to their salience (i.e., negative stimuli were faster elaborated than neutral and positive stimuli when top-down attentional mechanisms were involved, while slower performances were highlighted considering bottom-up attentional mechanisms in response to emotional stimuli compared to neutral stimuli). Moreover, an association between HRV, trait anxiety levels, and change blindness phenomenon was confirmed. These results underline the role of HRV as a possible predictor of the alteration of attentional mechanism in anxiety.
| S-EPMC8070415 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Heart function is a key component of whole-organismal physiology. Bioimaging is commonly, but not exclusively, used for quantifying heart function in transparent individuals, including early developmental stages of aquatic animals, many of which are transparent. However, a central limitation of many imaging-related methods is the lack of transferability between species, life-history stages and experimental approaches. Furthermore, locating the heart in mobile individuals remains challenging. Here, we present HeartCV: an open-source Python package for automated measurement of heart rate and heart rate variability that integrates automated localization and is transferrable across a wide range of species. We demonstrate the efficacy of HeartCV by comparing its outputs with measurements made manually for a number of very different species with contrasting heart morphologies. Lastly, we demonstrate the applicability of the software to different experimental approaches and to different dataset types, such as those corresponding to longitudinal studies.
| S-EPMC9659326 | biostudies-literature