TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wiemer, Julian
A1  - Rauner, Milena M.
A1  - Stegmann, Yannik
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Reappraising fear: is up-regulation more efficient than down-regulation?
JF  - Motivation and Emotion
N2  - Catastrophizing thoughts may contribute to the development of anxiety, but functional emotion regulation may help to improve treatment. No study so far directly compared up- and down-regulation of fear by cognitive reappraisal. Here, healthy individuals took part in a cued fear experiment, in which multiple pictures of faces were paired twice with an unpleasant scream or presented as safety stimuli. Participants (N = 47) were asked (within-subjects) to down-regulate, to up-regulate and to maintain their natural emotional response. Valence and arousal ratings indicated successful up- and down-regulation of the emotional experience, while heart rate and pupil dilation increased during up-regulation, but showed no reduction in down-regulation. State and trait anxiety correlated with evaluations of safety but not threat stimuli, which supports the role of deficient safety learning in anxiety. Reappraisal did not modulate this effect. In conclusion, this study reveals evidence for up-regulation effects in fear, which might be even more efficient than down-regulation on a physiological level and highlights the importance of catastrophizing thoughts for the maintenance of fear and anxiety.
KW  - anxiety
KW  - fear conditioning
KW  - cognitive reappraisal
KW  - pupil diameter
KW  - heart rate
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-269187
SN  - 1573-6644
VL  - 45
IS  - 2
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stegmann, Yannik
A1  - Andreatta, Marta
A1  - Pauli, Paul
A1  - Wieser, Matthias J.
T1  - Associative learning shapes visual discrimination in a web-based classical conditioning task
JF  - Scientific Reports
N2  - Threat detection plays a vital role in adapting behavior to changing environments. A fundamental function to improve threat detection is learning to differentiate between stimuli predicting danger and safety. Accordingly, aversive learning should lead to enhanced sensory discrimination of danger and safety cues. However, studies investigating the psychophysics of visual and auditory perception after aversive learning show divergent findings, and both enhanced and impaired discrimination after aversive learning have been reported. Therefore, the aim of this web-based study is to examine the impact of aversive learning on a continuous measure of visual discrimination. To this end, 205 participants underwent a differential fear conditioning paradigm before and after completing a visual discrimination task using differently oriented grating stimuli. Participants saw either unpleasant or neutral pictures as unconditioned stimuli (US). Results demonstrated sharpened visual discrimination for the US-associated stimulus (CS+), but not for the unpaired conditioned stimuli (CS-). Importantly, this finding was irrespective of the US's valence. These findings suggest that associative learning results in increased stimulus salience, which facilitates perceptual discrimination in order to prioritize attentional deployment.
KW  - classical conditioning
KW  - fear conditioning
KW  - psychology
KW  - sensory processing
KW  - visual system
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-260480
VL  - 11
IS  - 1
ER  -