On the Automatic Nature of Threat: Physiological and Evaluative Reactions to Survival-Threats Outside Conscious Perception

Abstract

A neural architecture that preferentially processes immediate survival threats relative to other negatively and positively valenced stimuli presumably evolved to facilitate survival. The empirical literature on threat superiority, however, has suffered two problems: methodologically distinguishing threatening stimuli from negative stimuli and differentiating whether responses are sped and strengthened by threat superiority or delayed and diminished by conscious processing of nonthreatening stimuli. We addressed both problems in three within-subject studies that compared responses to empirically validated sets of threating, negative, positive, and neutral stimuli, and isolated threat superiority from the opposing effect of conscious attention by presenting stimuli outside conscious perception. Consistent with threat superiority, threatening stimuli elicited stronger skin-conductance (Study 1), startle-eyeblink (Study 2), and more negative downstream evaluative responses (Study 3) relative to the undifferentiated responses to negative, positive, and neutral stimuli.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00090-6.

Keywords: Skin-conductance; Startle eyeblink; Subliminal; Threat; Valence.

Fig. 1

Examples of stimuli used in all studies

Fig. 2

Mean Pre-PpSM processed skin-conductance response to each stimulus type

Fig. 3

Mean standardized eye-blink amplitude (and SEM calculated within-participants; O’Brien & Cousineau, 2014) as a function of stimulus type

Fig. 4

Mean valence ratings (and SEM, calculated with-in participants; O’Brien & Cousineau, 2014) as a function of stimulus

Fig. 5

Forest plot of meta-analyzed effect sizes with average effect estimated from all three studies (Model 1) or only Studies 1 and 2 (Model 2)