Autonomic Habituation During Very Brief Exposure to Spiders
Warren, R., Edelmann, M., Mesisco, M., & Siegel, P. (2014). Autonomic habituation during very brief exposure to spiders
All of us have experienced fear; a primitive, yet powerful emotion, at some point in our lives. While specific fears and anxieties are unique depending on the individual, the way our bodies react are very similar. The amygdala activates the fight or flight response when viewing the subject of our distress, increasing blood flow, heart rate, body temperature, and breathing. All of theses symptoms are adaptive, providing us with a biological advantage when we recognize danger, but what happens when we incorrectly categorize something as dangerous?
Over 19 million Americans have phobias, or an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to a specific situation, living creature, place, or object. These individuals live in constant distress due to either coming into contact or the possibility of coming into contact with their phobia, The most common form of behavioral therapy for improving phobic symptoms, also known as exposure therapy, This therapy involves having a phobic patient come into close proximity to their phobia for an extended period of time to induce habituation, or a reduction in the severity of response due to repeated exposures to it. Though this therapy greatly improves the living condition of those with a phobia, it is often difficult for the afflicted to agree to this therapy due to their intense emotional and physiological response. How could we help phobic patient reduce their symptoms without physically exposing them to their phobia?
Responsibilities
● Reviewed background literature on synaptic plasticity, the neural anatomy of the limbic system, and the neural pathways of fear;
● Interviewed participants and distributed surveys to determine eligibility for the study;
● Recruited research participants from a human subjects pool (3,000+ undergrads);
● Administered a battery of computerized instruments and behavioral measures to identify diagnostic participants, including emotional priming, attention and perception tasks, and in vivo exposure to a live tarantula;
● Delivered a complex skin conductance experiment to assess unconscious emotion;
● Coded and analyzed data using Powerlab, SPSS, and Microsoft Excel.
Research Interests and Implications
● Very brief exposure (VBE) is a continuous series of masked phobic images, each presented for a very brief duration
● Tested the use of VBE to reduce physiological symptoms and phobic behavior of arachnophobic participants
● Use of both a physiological measure (Skin Conductance) and a behavioral measure (Behavioral Avoidance Test)
● Results suggests that fear responses were reduced without conscious processing
● Subsequent iterations of this study have used fMRI imaging to measure Blood Oxygen Level Dependent Response as a physiological measure