title: The use of stimulus dimensions in judgement making in spider fearful and nonfearful individuals.
abstract: This study uses a multidimensional scaling approach to investigate the hypothesis that spider fearful individuals give priority to a threat-safety dimension when making judgments. The results show that when making judgments about stimuli, spider fearful individuals (1) placed significantly greater comparative weighting on a threat-relevant dimension than on a non-emotive dimension (colour), and (2) tended to rate threatening pairs of stimuli and safe pairs of stimuli as more similar than did the nonfearful group. This prioritised dimensional processing suggests a mechanism by which phobics can exhibit what initially appear to be paradoxical tendencies to give priority to both threat and safety information.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Group, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Cavanagh
authors.forename: G C
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: Davey
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010552:Personality Assessment; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D013112:Spiders