On the automatic nature of phobic fear: Conditioned electrodermal responses to masked fear-relevant stimuli.

Normal Ss (n?=?64) were exposed either to pictures of snakes and spiders or to pictures of flowers and mushrooms in a differential conditioning paradigm in which one of the pictures signaled an electric shock. In a subsequent extinction series, these stimuli were presented backwardly masked by another stimulus for half of the Ss, whereas the other half received nonmasked extinction. In support of a hypothesis that suggests that nonconscious information-processing mechanisms are sufficient to activate responses to fear-relevant stimuli, differential skin conductance response to masked conditioning and control stimuli was obvious only for Ss conditioned to fear-relevant stimuli. These results were replicated in a 2nd experiment (n?=?32), which also demonstrated that the effect was unaffected by which visual half-field was used for stimulus presentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)