How do social fears in adolescence develop? Fear conditioning shapes attention orienting to social threat cues

Abstract

Social fears emerging in adolescence can have negative effects on emotional well-being. Yet the mechanisms by which these risks occur are unknown. One possibility is that associative learning results in fears to previously neutral social stimuli. Such conditioned responses may alter subsequent processing of social stimuli. We used a novel conditioning task to examine how associative processes influence social fear and attention orienting in adolescents. Neutral photographs were paired with socially rewarding or aversive stimuli during conditioning; a dot-probe task then assessed biases in attention orienting. The social conditioning task modified subjective ratings of the neutral stimuli. Moreover, for the neutral stimulus that was paired with the aversive stimulus, the strength of conditioning showed a relationship with subsequent attentional vigilance. The findings elucidate mechanisms by which negative peer experiences during adolescence may affect emotional processing.

Figure 1

Subjective pleasantness (top) and scariness (bottom) ratings (mean±SEM) for each CS following baseline, acquisition, and extinction trials showing that conditioning modified perceptions of the neutral stimuli.

Figure 2

Relationship between post-acquisition scariness ratings and attentional bias scores for the CSneg; both the linear and quadratic models are displayed, but the quadratic model showed a significantly improved fit over the linear model.