Can you learn to fear something you only imagine?
People learned to fear a simple pattern they only imagined when imagining it was paired with a shock, and that fear carried over to seeing the pattern, and vice versa.
Source
Fear in the Theater of the Mind: Differential Fear Conditioning With Imagined Stimuli
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subjects differential fear conditioning with Gabor patches as CS+ and CS-, where participants were cued to view or imagine each patch and mild shock was paired with either viewing or imagining the CS+; Experiments 2 and 3 removed the auditory cue from view trials
- N
- Analysed samples: 33 in Experiment 1 (both phases), 27 in Experiment 2 (visual acquisition only), 26 in Experiment 3 (imagery acquisition only), after removing shock nonresponders and noisy recordings
- Population
- Healthy college-age adults, mostly women, recruited from a university participant pool
- Outcome
- Self-reported fear of shock per trial type (1-7 scale) and skin conductance responses (SCR) to CS+ versus CS-
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Participants were cued on each trial to either look at or imagine one of two striped patterns (Gabor patches). In a visual-acquisition phase, viewing one pattern (the CS+) was sometimes followed by a mild electric shock; in an imagery-acquisition phase, imagining the CS+ was sometimes shocked instead. Fear was measured with sweat-gland skin conductance responses on each trial and with fear ratings after each phase. Experiments 2 and 3 repeated each phase separately with no audio cue before view trials, to rule out conditioning to the spoken instruction.
What they found
Fear acquired to a viewed pattern transferred to imagining that same pattern, shown in fear ratings in Experiments 1 and 2 and in skin conductance in Experiment 1. Fear could be conditioned directly to an imagined pattern in both Experiments 1 and 3, and these were the largest effects in the study. Fear acquired through imagery transferred to viewing the pattern in self-report in Experiments 1 and 3 and in skin conductance in Experiment 3, but in Experiment 1 only for the 22 people who had clearly acquired imagined fear. Responses were always strongest for whichever modality had actually been paired with shock.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Several generalisation effects were weak or absent in skin conductance: in Experiment 2, the imagined CS+ did not produce reliably larger responses than the imagined CS-, and Bayesian evidence there favoured no effect. The authors cannot fully rule out that people learned a verbal rule about which pattern predicted shock rather than a picture-like mental image. Stimuli were simple striped patches and participants were young college students, so it is unknown whether the effects hold for complex objects, older adults or people with anxiety disorders. The analyses were not preregistered, and 6 to 12 participants per experiment were excluded for not responding to shock or noisy recordings.
Key terms
- Differential fear conditioning
- A procedure where one cue (CS+) is paired with an unpleasant event and a second cue (CS-) never is; learning shows up as a bigger response to the CS+.
- Conditioned stimulus (CS+ / CS-)
- An initially neutral cue; the CS+ predicts the aversive event and the CS- is the safe comparison.
- Unconditioned stimulus (US)
- An event that naturally produces a response without learning, here a mild electric shock.
- Skin conductance response (SCR)
- A brief rise in the skin's electrical conductance caused by sweating, used as a physiological index of arousal and fear.
- Generalisation
- When a learned response spreads from the trained cue to related cues, here from seeing a pattern to imagining it or vice versa.
- Depictive theory of imagery
- The view that mental images reuse picture-like perceptual representations, rather than being purely verbal descriptions.
Flashcards
0 of 11 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
What served as the conditioned stimuli in these experiments?
Common questions
Why does this matter for anxiety disorders?
Intrusive images and flashbacks are central in anxiety and PTSD; if fear can be learned and expressed through imagery alone, imagined scenes could both create and maintain fear, and imagery might also be used in treatment.
Why were the audio cues removed in Experiments 2 and 3?
In Experiment 1 every trial began with a spoken instruction, so people might have feared the words rather than the patterns; removing cues from view trials tested whether transfer still happened without that shared cue.
Why do self-report and skin conductance sometimes disagree here?
They may capture partly different aspects of fear, conscious expectation versus bodily arousal, and self-reports tend to show larger conditioning effects, possibly due to less measurement noise.
More on Learning