Fear acquisition and liking of out-group and in-group members: Learning bias or attention?

Abstract

The present study explores the notion of an out-group fear learning bias that is characterized by facilitated fear acquisition toward harm-doing out-group members. Participants were conditioned with two in-group and two out-group faces as conditioned stimuli. During acquisition, one in-group and one out-group face was paired with an aversive shock whereas the other in-group and out-group face was presented without shock. Psychophysiological measures of fear conditioning (skin conductance and pupil size) and explicit and implicit liking exhibited increased differential responding to out-group faces compared to in-group faces. However, the results did not clearly indicate that harm-doing out-group members were more readily associated with fear than harm-doing in-group members. In contrast, the out-group face not paired with shock decreased conditioned fear and disliking at least to the same extent that the shock-associated out-group face increased these measures. Based on these results, we suggest an account of the out-group fear learning bias that relates to an attentional bias to process in-group information.

Learning to fear outgroups: An associative learning explanation for the development and reduction of intergroup anxiety

“…Preparedness theory's application in associative learning experiments with social stimuli (e.g., Navarrete et al, ) is not without critics. Mallan, Lipp, and Cochrane () argue that fear learning toward outgroups does not meet the necessary conditions to satisfy the strict criteria of preparedness (see also Koenig et al, ; Maia, ). Prepared associations are easily acquired, resistant to extinction, and are cognitively irrational in comparison to unprepared associations (Öhman & Mineka, ).…”

The more, the better: Auditory threat conditioning using multiple conditioned and unconditioned stimuli over many trials

“…Importantly, instead of taking an average (or peak) pupil size over the entire trial period, or within pre-defined time bins (García-Palacios et al, 2018;Jentsch et al, 2020;Koenig et al, 2017;Leuchs et al, 2017), the differential pupil CRs we observed held true for time windows that were derived from the data themselves.…”