Description
Why do spider-related stimuli elicit aversion in arachnophobic individuals? Previous research has addressed this question by focusing on responses to predefined psychological dimensions (e.g., fear, arousal) to understand how spider-related stimuli are mentally represented. However, these predefined dimensions may miss essential aspects of mental representations for spiders and ignore individual differences. Here, we use an approach based on similarity judgments to flexibly reveal psychological dimensions underlying mental representations, as similarity judgments play a key role in conceptualizing representations. We first conduct an online Spatial Arrangement Task to obtain estimates of mental similarity between spider images. In this task, participants rearrange images on a two-dimensional canvas to position similar images proportionally closer together. The collected data are analyzed by multidimensional scaling (MDS) to obtain dimensions, and the number of dimensions is determined by model comparison procedures. Two dimensions, visually related to spider size and spider in contact with the human, were uncovered from the pilot data. In addition, our lab has collected participants’ brain responses to spider images in a separate passive-viewing fMRI study. We perform representational similarity analysis to compare the neural response patterns with the behavioral similarity judgments. The findings complement existing psychological dimensions, shed more light on the arachnophobia mechanism and generalize to other phobias. The model-based characterization of phobia-relevant stimuli is an important step in establishing novel diagnostic procedures and treatments for phobia-related disorders.| Period | 7 Jul 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Computational Psychiatry Conference 2023 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Dublin, IrelandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |