The role of clock and memory processes in the timing of fear cues in humans
Item
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Title
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The role of clock and memory processes in the timing of fear cues in humans
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ba58ba23f494:11925
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identifier
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12617
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Creator
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Grommet, Erich K.,
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Contributor
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Bruce L. Brown
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Experimental psychology | Behavioral psychology | Emotion | Fear | Memory Mixing | Temporal Bisection | Timing
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Abstract
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Recent research on the effects of fear on timing has focused on two accounts proposed by Scalar Expectancy Theory (Church, 1984; Gibbon, 1977) for why the durations of fear stimuli are overestimated in comparison to the durations of neutral stimuli. One possibility is that fear serves as an arouser that increases the speed of a hypothetical internal clock. In this account, greater temporal overestimation of fear relative to neutral stimuli is predicted for longer stimulus durations relative to shorter stimulus durations. The other account is that fear increases attention to time, which results in organisms beginning to time fear-evoking stimuli sooner than they do neutral stimuli. In this possibility, the effect of fear does not interact with stimulus duration. Experiment 1 asked which of these two possibilities was the underlying mechanism of temporal overestimation of fear cues by manipulating emotion-evoking pictures (fear-evoking vs. neutral) across multiple duration ranges in the temporal bisection task. Larger effects of fear were observed at the longest duration range in comparison to the shortest duration range, supporting the arousal hypothesis. A related area that has been left relatively unexplored is the role that reference memory may play in the temporal overestimation of fear-evoking stimuli. Penney, Gibbon, and Meck's (2000) memory mixing hypothesis proposes that overestimation is only possible in preparations that allow for recalled reference memories for stimulus durations to be mixed across conditions. Therefore, in the second experiment, we manipulated whether or not fear and neutral cues were presented within the same session, a condition that may be necessary for memory mixing to occur. Fear cues were overestimated relative to neutral cues within the session in which fear and neutral cues were both presented, but no effect of emotion was observed between the two sessions in which fear and neutral cues were presented separately.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
