Given the evolutionary significance of survival, the mind might be particularly sensitive (in terms of strength and speed of reaction) to stimuli that pose an immediate threat to physical harm. To rectify limitations in past research, we pilot-tested stimuli to obtain images that are threatening, nonthreatening-negative, positive, or neutral. Three studies revealed that participants (a) were faster to detect a threatening than nonthreatening-negative image when each was embedded among positive or neutral images, (b) oriented their initial gaze more frequently toward threatening than nonthreatening-negative, positive, or neutral images, and (c) evidenced larger startle-eyeblinks to threatening than to nonthreatening-negative, positive, or neutral images. Social-psychological implications for the mind’s sensitivity to threat are discussed.
AmodioD. M.Harmon-JonesE.DevineP. (2003). Individual differences in the activation and control of affective race bias as assessed by startle eyeblink response and self-report. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 738-753.
4.
BlanchetteI. (2006). Snakes, spiders, guns, and syringes: How specific are evolutionary constraints on the detection of threatening stimuli?The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 1484-1504.
5.
BlumenthalT. D.CuthbertB. N.FilionD. L.HackleyS.LippO. V.Van BoxtelA. (2005). Committee report: Guidelines for human startle eyeblink electromyographic studies. Psychophysiology, 42, 1-15.
6.
BradleyM. M.CuthbertB. N.LangP. J. (1999). Affect and the startle reflex. In DawsonM. E.SchellA.BoehmeltA. (Eds.), Startle modification: Implications for neuroscience, cognitive science and clinical science. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
7.
BrodeurM. B.Dionne-DostieE.MontreuilT.LepageM. (2010). The bank of standardized stimuli (BOSS), a new set of 480 normative photos of objects to be used as visual stimuli in cognitive research. PLoS ONE, 5, e10773.
8.
BroschT.SharmaD. (2005). The role of fear-relevant stimuli in visual search: A comparison of phylogenetic and ontogenetic stimuli. Emotion, 5, 360-364.
9.
CalderA. J.LawrenceA. D.YoungA. W. (2001). Neuropsychology of fear and loathing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 352-363.
10.
CostaT.CaudaF.CriniM.TatuM. K.CeleghinA.de GelderB.TamiettoM. (2014). Temporal and spatial neural dynamics in the perception of basic emotions from complex scenes. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9, 1690-1703.
11.
CunninghamW. A.BroschT. (2012). Motivational salience: Amygdala tuning from traits, needs, values, and goals. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 54-59.
12.
CunninghamW. A.JohnsonM. K.RayeC. L.GatenbyJ. C.GoreJ. C.BanajiM. R. (2004). Separable neural components in the processing of black and white faces. Psychological Science, 15, 806-813.
13.
CunninghamW. A.PackerD. J.KesekA.Van BavelJ. J. (2009). Implicit measurement of attitudes: A physiological approach. In PettyR. E.FazioR. H.PrinolP. (Eds.), Insights from the new implicit measures (pp. 485–512). New York: Psychology Press.
14.
CunninghamW. A.ZelazoP. D.PackerD. J.Van BavelJ. J. (2007). The iterative reprocessing model: A multilevel framework for attitudes and evaluation. Social Cognition, 5, 736-760.
15.
DavisM. (1992). The role of the amygdala in fear and anxiety. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 15, 353-375.
16.
DijksterhuisA.AartsH. (2003). On wildebeests and humans: The preferential detection of negative stimuli. Psychological Science, 1, 14-18.
17.
DillonD. G.LaBarK. S. (2005). Startle modulation during conscious emotion regulation is arousal-dependent. Behavioral Neuroscience, 119, 1118-1124.
18.
DondersN. C.CorrellJ.WittenbrinkB. (2008). Danger stereotypes predict racially biased attentional allocation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1328-1333.
19.
EastwoodJ. D.SmilekD.MerikleP. M. (2001). Differential attentional guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 63, 1004-1013.
20.
EstevesF.DimbergU.ÖhmanA. (1994). Automatically elicited fear: Conditioned skin conductance responses to masked facial expressions. Cognition and Emotion, 5, 393-413.
21.
FazioR. H.JacksonJ. R.DuntonB. C.WilliamsC. J. (1995). Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: A bona fide pipeline?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1013-1027.
22.
FazioR. H.OlsonM. A. (2014). The MODE model: Attitude-behavior processes as a function of motivation and opportunity. In ShermanJ. W.GawronskB.TropeY. (Eds.), Dual process theories of the social mind (pp. 155-171). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
23.
FilionD. L.DawsonM. E.SchellA. M. (1998). The psychological significance of human startle eyeblink modification: A review. Biological Psychology, 47, 1-43.
24.
FoxE.DamjanovicL. (2006). The eyes are sufficient to produce a threat superiority effect. Emotion, 6, 534-539.
25.
FoxE.GriggsL.MouchlianitisE. (2007). The detection of fear-relevant stimuli: Are guns noticed as quickly as snakes?Emotion, 7, 691-696.
26.
GarridoM. I.BarnesG. R.SahaniM.DolanR. J. (2012). Functional evidence for a dual route to amygdala. Current Biology, 22, 129-134.
27.
GarvertM. M.FristonK. J.DolanR. J.GarridoM. I. (2014). Subcortical amygdala pathways enable rapid face processing. NeuroImage, 102, 309-316.
28.
GawronskiB.BodenhausenG. V. (2007). Unraveling the processes underlying evaluation: Attitudes from the perspective of the APE model. Social Cognition, 25, 687-717.
29.
GawronskiB.BodenhausenG. V. (2011). The associativepropositional evaluation model: Theory, evidence, and open questions. In ZannaM. P.OlsonJ. M. (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 59–127). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
30.
GrillonC.AmeliR.WoodsS. W.MerikangasK.DavisM. (1991). Fear-potentiated startle in humans: Effects of anticipatory anxiety on the acoustic blink reflex. Psychophysiology, 28, 588-595.
31.
GuglielmiR. S. (1999). Psychophysiological assessment of prejudice: Past research, current status, and future direction. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 123-157.
32.
HaseltonM. G.BussD. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81-91.
33.
HitchcockJ. H.DavisM. (1991). Efferent pathway of the amygdala involved in conditioned fear as measured with the fear-potentiated startle paradigm. Behavioral Neuroscience, 105, 826-842.
34.
ItoT. A.CacioppoJ. T.LangP. J. (1998). Eliciting affect using the International Affective Picture System: Trajectories through evaluative space. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 855-879.
35.
ItoT. A.LarsenJ. T.SmithN. K.CacioppoJ. T. (1998). Negative formation weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 887-900.
36.
IttiL.KochC.NieburE. (1998). A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 11, 1254-1259.
37.
KahnK. B.DaviesP. G. (2011). Differentially dangerous? Phenotypic racial stereotypicality increases implicit bias among ingroup and outgroup members. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 14, 569-580.
38.
KnightD. C.WatersN.BandettiniP. A. (2009). Neural substrates of explicit and implicit fear memory. NeuroImage, 45, 208-214.
39.
KveragaK.BoshyanJ.AdamsR. B.MoteJ.BetzN.WardN.. . . BarrettL. F. (2014). If it bleeds, it leads: Separating threat from mere negativity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 28-35.
40.
LangP. J.BradleyM. M.CuthbertB. N. (1990). Emotion, attention, and the startle reflex. Psychological Review, 97, 377-395.
41.
LangP. J.BradleyM. M.CuthbertB. N. (2008). International affective picture system (IAPS): Affective ratings of pictures and instruction manual (Technical Report A-8). Gainesville: University of Florida.
42.
LeDouxJ. (1996). Emotional networks and motor control: A fearful view. Progress in Brain Research, 107, 437-446.
43.
LeDouxJ. (2012). Rethinking the emotional brain. Neuron, 73, 653-676.
44.
MarchD. S.GaertnerL.OlsonM. A. (in press). On the prioritized processing of threat in a dual implicit process model of evaluation. Psychological Inquiry.
45.
MarchD. S.GrahamR. (2015). Exploring implicit ingroup and outgroup bias toward Hispanics. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 18, 89-103.
46.
MikelsJ. A.FredricksonB. L.LarkinG. R.LindbergC. M.MaglioS. J.Reuter-LorenzP. A. (2005). Emotional category data on images from the International Affective Picture System. Behavior Research Methods, 37, 626-630.
47.
MorrisJ. S.ÖhmanA.DolanR. J. (1998). Conscious and unconscious emotional learning in the human amygdala. Nature, 393, 467-470.
48.
NesseR. M. (2005). Natural selection and the regulation of defenses: A signal detection analysis of the smoke detector principle. Evolution & Human Behavior, 26, 88-105.
49.
ÖhmanA.FlyktA.EstevesF. (2001). Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 3, 466-478.
50.
ÖhmanA.LundqvistD.EstevesF. (2001). The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3, 381-396.
51.
ÖhmanA.MinekaS. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483-522.
52.
ÖhmanA.MinekaS. (2003). The mailicious serpent: Snakes as a prototypical stimulis for an evolved module of fear. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 5-9.
53.
OlatunjiB. O.WilliamsN. L.TolinD. F.AbramowitzJ. S.SawchukC. N.LohrJ. M.ElwoodL. S. (2007). The Disgust Scale: Item analysis, factor structure, and suggestions for refinement. Psychological Assessment, 19, 281-297.
54.
OlsonM. A.CrawfordM. T.DevlinW. (2009). Evidence for the underestimation of implicit in-group favoritism among low-status groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1111-1116.
55.
OosterwijkS.LindquistK. A.AdebayoM.BarrettL. F. (2015). The neural representation of typical and atypical experiences of negative images: Comparing fear, disgust and morbid fascination. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11, 11-22.
56.
PessoaL.AdolphsR. (2010). Emotion processing and the amygdala: From a “low road” to “many roads” of evaluating biological significance. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 773-783.
57.
RaynerK. (1978). Eye movements in reading and information processing. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 618-660.
58.
ReaghZ. M.KnightD. C. (2013). Negative, but not positive emotional images modulate the startle response independent of conscious awareness. Emotion, 4, 782-791.
59.
RiméB.DelfosseC.CorsiniS. (2005). Emotional fascination: Responses to viewing pictures of September 11 attacks. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 923-932.
60.
RobinsonJ. D.VranaS. R. (2000). The time course of emotional and attentional modulation of the startle eyeblink reflex during imagery. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 37, 275-289.
61.
RosenJ. B.HitchcockJ. M.SananesC. B.MiserendinoM. J.DavisM. (1991). A direct projection from the central nucleus of the amygdala to the acoustic startle pathway: Anterograde and retrograde tracing studies. Behavioral Neuroscience, 105, 817-825.
62.
Roskos-EwoldsenD. R.FazioR. H. (1992). On the orienting value of attitudes: Attitude accessibility as a determinant of an object’s attraction of visual attention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 198-211.
63.
RubenkingB.LangA. (2014). Captivated and grossed out: An examination of processing core and sociomoral disgusts in entertainment media. Journal of Communication, 64, 543-565.
64.
RussellJ. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1161-1178.
65.
RussellJ. A.BarrettL. F. (1999). Core affect, prototypical emotional episodes, and other things called emotion: Dissecting the elephant. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 805-819.
66.
SchallerM.NeubergS. L. (2012). Danger, disease, and the nature of prejudice(s). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 1-46.
67.
TurnerS. A.Jr.SilviaP. J. (2006). Must interesting things be pleasant? A test of competing appraisal structures. Emotion, 6, 670-674.
68.
VanmanE. J.RyanJ. P.PedersenW. C.ItoT. A. (2013). Probing prejudice with startle eyeblink modification: A marker of attention, emotion, or both. International Journal of Psychological Research, 6, 30-41.
69.
VranaS. R.SpenceE. L.LangP. J. (1988). The startle probe response: A new measure of emotion?Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97, 487-491.
70.
VuilleumierP.ArmonyJ.DriverJ.DolanR. J. (2001). Effects of attention and emotion on face processing in the human brain: An event-related fMRI study. Neuron, 30, 829-841.
71.
WestG. L.AndersonA. A.PrattJ. (2009). Motivationally significant stimuli show visual prior entry: Evidence for attentional capture. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35, 1032-1042.
72.
WhalenP. J.KaganJ.CookR. G.DavisF. C.KimH.PolisS.. . . JohnstoneT. (2004). Human amygdala responsivity to masked fearful eye whites. Science, 306, 2061-2061.
73.
WhalenP. J.RauchS. L.EtcoffN. L.McInerneyS. C.LeeM. B.JenikeM. A. (1998). Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. The Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 411-418.
74.
YangE.ZaldD. H.BlakeR. (2007). Fearful expressions gain preferential access to awareness during continuous flash suppression. Emotion, 7, 882-886.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
