Bublatzky F. DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft BU 3255/1-2: A face to be loved or feared? A follow-up on interindividual differences and clinical implications. 06/2020-05/2023.
The expectation of a negative event is often worse than its experience. This follow-up project focuses on social learning and person perception as a function of interindividual differences and its clinical implications. In the first funding period, I have investigated how aversive anticipations, as triggered by verbal instructions, modulate face and person perception. Threat-related biases in attentional processing, associative learning, and physiological responding were observed. In healthy participants, these biases showed high covariance with self-reported social and trait anxiety. The second funding period will focus on the role of threat-related biases in normal and pathological anxiety. To this end, the overall variance in vulnerability factors for anxiety (e.g. threat-related biases, previous trauma experience) will be enhanced by including participants with moderate to high levels of social and trait anxiety, as well as individuals with adverse childhood experiences. In addition, an intensified focus will be on changing threatening associations. Here, reversal learning will be used to shift contextual threat to safety and the workings of multiple repeated reversal instructions will be examined. Moreover, combinations of social-emotional information will be tested as explicit safety cues (e.g. smiling romantic partner cueing safety) under long-term threatening conditions. Attentional processes, psychophysiological responding, behavioral measures and questionnaire data are examined to link face perception and social learning. Taken together, a dimensional transdiagnostic approach is chosen with a focus on threat-related biases in person perception – from healthy functional to the anxiety disorder spectrum.
DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft : Social learning in post-traumatic stress disorder (GRK-2350 associated project). 01/2019-12/2021.
Traumatic childhood experiences place a great burden on the person affected, often into adulthood. As a serious and long-term consequence, post-traumatic stress disorder can develop. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common mental health disorder that is associated with a variety of impairments for those affected, including problems with learning and memory. In the development of PTSD, affected individuals are thought to experience their past trauma as if it were a current and ongoing threat. As a result, even inaccurate or false situations can be associated with the threat, which can ultimately lead to situations that are harmless (from today's perspective) being brought into a threat context, thereby limiting those affected in their everyday lives. People learn such contexts in different ways. For example, one can learn through one's own experience, but also through verbal warning or observation of another person. Such social learning pathways play an important role in both the acquisition and treatment of PTSD. We therefore investigate whether the learning mechanisms of threat and safety differ between people both with and without trauma, and between traumatized people with and without PTSD. To investigate associated attentional and memory processes, we measure electrical brain activity using electroencephalography. In the study, non-painful electrical stimuli administered via electrodes on the arm serve as "threatening stimuli." Through the results, we hope to better understand (altered) social learning mechanisms in PTSD and provide impetus for new treatment concepts.
Bublatzky F. DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft BU 3255/1-1: A face to be loved or feared? Emotional and social mediation of verbal threat learning. 01/2018-12/2019.
To beware of a particular person or situation, we do not necessarily need to
have had negative experiences with them. Aversive anticipations, as
triggered by social communication, have been shown to reliably activate
physiological defense mechanisms. However, very little is known about
how instructional learning modulates face and person perception. The
overarching aim is to examine the mutual impact of verbal and facial
information on threat and safety learning (acquisition and extinction). Three
main questions are addressed: (1) How effective is facial information in
cueing instructed threat or safety (e.g., face identity or facial expression)?
(2) To what degree is face processing modulated by aversive anticipation
during sustained contextual threat? This two-sided approach (phasic cue
vs. sustained context) is adopted to account for processes involved in acute
and sustained threat (i.e., fear and anxiety). (3) To what extent can social
factors facilitate the extinction of threat associations? Here, pleasant facial
expressions, pictures of significant others (e.g., romantic partner), and
safety instructions are hypothesized to inhibit fear acquisition and/or to
accelerate extinction learning. Attentional processes, psychophysiological
responding, and behavioral measures are examined to link face perception
and social learning. As aversive anticipations can be amazingly persistent –
even when the aversive outcomes are never experienced – the implications
for a range of anxiety disorders are evident.