Fear acquisition and liking of out-group and in-group members: Learning bias or attention?

Publication date: Available online 1 September 2017
Source:Biological Psychology
Author(s): Stephan Koenig, Peter Nauroth, Sara Lucke, Harald Lachnit, Mario Gollwitzer, Metin Uengoer
The present study explores the notion of an out-group fear learning bias that is characterized by a facilitated fear acquisition toward harm-doing out-group members. Participants were conditioned with two in-group and two out-group faces as conditioned stimuli. During acquisition, one in-group and one out-group face was paired with an aversive shock whereas the other in-group and out-group faces were presented without shock. Psychophysiological measures of fear conditioning (skin conductance and pupil size) and explicit and implicit liking exhibited an increased differential responding towards out-group faces compared to in-group faces on. However, the results did not clearly indicate that harm-doing out-group members were more readily associated with fear than harm-doing in-group members. In contrast, the out-group face not paired with shock decreased conditioned fear and disliking at least to the same extent that the shock-associated out-group face increased these measures. Based on these results, we suggest an account of the out-group fear learning bias that relates to an attentional bias to process in-group information.



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