Fear and Disgust from the Perspective of Conditioning Learning

Shen Siyi; Mei Ying; Wang Jinxia; Dai Yuqian; Wu Qi; Lei Yi

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230408

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2023, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (4) : 825-832. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230408

General Psychology, Experimental Psychology & Ergonomics

Fear and Disgust from the Perspective of Conditioning Learning

Shen Siyi, Mei Ying, Wang Jinxia, Dai Yuqian, Wu Qi, Lei Yi

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Abstract

As basic emotions, fear and disgust are negative emotions that are related to threats and make people feel strongly unpleasant. They are of great importance to human survival and adaptation. Moderate fear and disgust are conducive to the individual's awareness of danger and rapid defensive responses, but excessive fear and disgust will affect the individual's daily functioning and may even develop into post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobia, and other anxiety disorders. Previous studies have shown that excessive fear is the core mechanism of anxiety disorders, ignoring the role of disgust in it. In recent years, with the emergence of the ineffectiveness of exposure therapy for certain anxiety disorders and the disclosure of the close relationship between disgust and anxiety disorders, researchers began to explore the mechanisms underlying anxiety disorders from a new perspective. That is, disgust is also an important pathogenic factor of anxiety disorder, and fear and disgust should be combined to explain the pathogenesis of anxiety disorder.
Fear and disgust are the main emotions of anxiety disorders, and analyzing the characteristics of fear and disgust from the perspective of conditioned learning is expected to provide an important basis for related clinical treatment. Pavlovian conditioning is a classic paradigm for fear and disgust learning. A differential conditioning paradigm is often used in fear learning and disgust learning: a neutral stimulus(CS+) is repeatedly paired with an unconditional stimulus (US) that can cause aversion, and another neutral stimulus (CS-) never paired with unconditioned stimulus(US), as a result, only presenting a neutral stimulus (CS+) will cause aversive responses. Fear and disgust conditioning not only simulates the acquisition and extinction of fear and disgust, improving our theoretical understanding of the functional properties of fear and disgust, but also has implications for the prevention and targeted treatment of fear and disgust diseases.
Therefore, this article analyzes the characteristics of fear and disgust from the perspective of conditional learning, and summarizes the differences between fear learning and disgust learning. This article has three aims. First, the article discusses the relations among fear, disgust, and related anxiety disorders, and distinguishes the dominance of the two emotions. Secondly, from the perspective of conditioned learning, it compares the behavioral and neural mechanisms of fear and disgust. An in-depth analysis of extinction differences was carried out. Finally, from the insufficiency of research on disgust conditioning learning, we discussed directions for future studies. That is, future research can continue to explore the mechanisms underlying the disgust learning from generalization, extinction intervention, etc., and try to use adolescents and clinical patients as target groups. In sum, the emotional dominance of several different subtypes of anxiety disorder is distinguished and summarized, which provides an important theoretical basis for the screening of clinical anxiety disorder treatment targets; The differences between fear and disgust conditioning in subjective feelings, physiological response and functional brain areas indicate that exposure therapy is indeed an effective treatment for fear-led anxiety disorders, but cognitive intervention may be preferred for disgust-led disorders.

Key words

disgust / fear / anxiety disorders / classical conditioning

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Shen Siyi, Mei Ying, Wang Jinxia, Dai Yuqian, Wu Qi, Lei Yi. Fear and Disgust from the Perspective of Conditioning Learning[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2023, 46(4): 825-832 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230408

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