Learning
Does Believing You Can't Cope Impair Fear Learning?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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