Reactions to threat and personality: Psychometric differentiation of intensity and direction dimensions of human defensive behaviour

The response of social anxiety disorder patients to threat scenarios differs from that of healthy controls

“…In this study carried out in Hawaii with healthy volunteers, the majority of the predictions derived from the animal literature were confirmed, suggesting congruence between human and non-human defensive systems. These results have been largely replicated by our group in Brazil (6) and in another study (7) conducted in the United Kingdom, showing that individuals with personality traits reflecting high anxiety have a tendency to face a threat, while those with high traits of fear are more prone to run away from a threat.…”

The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality Questionnaire (RST-PQ): Development and validation.

“…When there is no motivation to approach a danger (hence, the BIS is not engaged), stimuli that can simply be avoided elicit the following defensive behaviors, according to defensive distance, or perceived threat, highto-low, respectively: Flight and Active Avoidance; and for stimuli that cannot be easily avoided, Fight and Freeze. These prototypical ethoexperimental animal responses have been modelled in human beings with some success (e.g., Blanchard, Hynd, Minke, Minemoto, & Blanchard, 2001;Perkins & Corr, 2006). There is now also evidence that such human behavioral analogues of rodent defensive paradigms are sensitive to drugs used to treat fear and anxiety in human patients (Perkins et al, 2009(Perkins et al, , 2013.…”

Effects of Lorazepam and Citalopram on Human Defensive Reactions: Ethopharmacological Differentiation of Fear and Anxiety

“…Since a validated questionnaire measure of this construct has not yet been created, we administered the Fear Survey Schedule (FSS) (Wolpe and Lang, 1977) on the basis that preliminary investigations of human defensive behavior using written threat scenarios suggest that the FSS has some capacity to measure perceived threat intensity (Perkins and Corr, 2006;Perkins et al, 2010).…”