Neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli in animal-fearful individuals.
Two experiments were conducted to explore neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli. Contingency assessments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from animal-fearful individuals during probabilistic classification learning in diverse motivational-affective contexts. As revealed by ERPs, attentional amplification of cortical sensory processing occurred in response to phobia-related stimuli. In particular, the posterior selection negativity in the ERPs to phobia-related stimuli had its origin in a bottom-up route, probably the amygdaloid-extrastriate cortex path. No evidence for top-down modulation of phobia-related attentional amplification was obtained. The covariation bias occurred only when aversive motivational-affective expectancies prevailed, suggesting a role of retrieval from associative emotional memory. Finally, phobia-related cue competition was probably related to the disruption of elaboration in memory of neutral and aversive stimulus pairings that was induced by belonging pairings of phobia-related and aversive stimuli. The findings have far-reaching implications for the interface between cognition and emotion.
Kopp
Bruno
B
Municipal Hospital and Technical University, Braunschweig, Germany. b.kopp@klinikum-braunschweig.de
Altmann
René
R
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000679:Amygdala / Q000503:physiopathology; D000818:Animals; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D009042:Motivation; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000503:physiopathology; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D012911:Snakes; D013112:Spiders