Does Believing You Can't Cope Impair Fear Learning?
People who were led to believe they cope poorly with stress struggled to distinguish between safe and dangerous cues during a subsequent fear-learning task.
Source
Low Perceived Self-Efficacy Impedes Discriminative Fear Learning
What they did
The researchers recruited 66 healthy young adults and randomly assigned 33 to a negative feedback group and 33 to a neutral feedback group. To manipulate self-efficacy, the negative group was falsely told they were poor copers, while the neutral group received neutral feedback. Both groups then completed a fear conditioning task where they learned to associate a visual cue with a mild electrical shock while researchers measured their sweat gland responses, emotional ratings, and shock expectations.
What they found
The negative feedback successfully lowered participants' confidence in their coping abilities. During the subsequent fear acquisition phase, participants who received negative feedback showed significantly worse discrimination between safe and dangerous stimuli when rating how likely they were to receive a shock. However, this manipulation did not affect their actual physiological sweat responses or their emotional ratings of how unpleasant the stimuli felt.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because the study relied on a brief, laboratory-induced drop in self-efficacy, the results may not reflect the experiences of people with chronically low self-efficacy. Additionally, the experiment was conducted solely on healthy young adults, meaning the findings might not generalize to clinical populations who suffer from anxiety disorders. Lastly, the study only found effects on conscious shock expectations, leaving it unclear why the manipulation failed to influence physiological fear responses or subsequent extinction learning.
Key terms
- Self-efficacy
- An individual's belief in their own capability to execute behaviors necessary to perform well or exercise control over challenging events.
- Fear conditioning
- A behavioral paradigm in which an organism learns to associate a neutral stimulus with an aversive event, resulting in a conditioned fear response to the previously neutral stimulus.
- Discriminative fear learning
- The process of learning to distinguish between a stimulus that predicts danger and a stimulus that predicts safety.
- Skin conductance response
- A physiological measure of sweat gland activity used as an index of autonomic nervous system arousal and emotional reactivity.
- Contingency rating
- A subjective measure of how strongly a participant expects a specific outcome, such as an electric shock, to follow a particular cue.
- Extinction
- The reduction of a conditioned response that occurs when the conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus.
Flashcards
Want these cards to stick?
Save the deck to NoteFren and study it with spaced repetition.
Quiz yourself
What was the primary objective of the study?
Common questions
Why did the negative feedback only affect participants' verbal expectations and not their physiological responses?
This difference is often explained by dual-process models of learning, which suggest that conscious intellectual expectations and automatic physical reactions are driven by different brain systems. The brief verbal manipulation may have disrupted higher-level cognitive processing in the prefrontal cortex without altering the deeper, more automatic emotional pathways governed by the amygdala.
How did the researchers make sure the feedback actually changed the participants' self-efficacy?
The researchers used a manipulation check using visual analogue scales before and after the feedback. They found that participants who received the negative feedback reported a significant drop in their perceived coping capability, whereas those in the neutral group showed no change.
Did the negative feedback make the participants feel more depressed or generally sadder?
No, the manipulation checks showed that while the negative feedback successfully decreased participants' perceived coping capability, it did not significantly alter their general negative mood or emotional state, meaning the effect on fear learning was specific to their self-efficacy beliefs.
What is the clinical relevance of these findings for treating anxiety?
Since low self-efficacy is a key feature of anxiety disorders, these findings suggest that a person's doubts about their ability to cope can actively impair their ability to tell safe situations apart from dangerous ones. Boosting a patient's self-efficacy might therefore be a crucial component in improving the success of exposure therapies.
More on Learning