ReviewNeuroscience and biobehavioral reviews2011
Human threat management systems: self-protection and disease avoidance.
Review in Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 111 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
111 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The relationship between risk perceptions and negative emotions in the COVID-19: a meta-analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Pooled it
- When too much is not enough: obsessive-compulsive disorder as a pathology of stopping, rather than starting.PloS one · 2012Trial
- Changing the narrative: stories reduce biases against anomalous faces.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- A Threat Management Approach to Explaining Women's Aversive Rape Fantasies.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Temporal Stability of Neural Markers of Motivated and Voluntary Attention: Case-by-Case and Group Analyses.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Three years of pandemic stress and staffing challenges: a retrospective qualitative study of COVID-19 impacts on frontline healthcare workers' mental health and wellbeing.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- The Multiple Perspectives Approach to Understanding Sexual-Economic Exchange.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Review
- Born to Fear the Machine? Genetic and Environmental Influences on Negative Attitudes toward AI Agents.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- The uncanny valley effect and immune activation in virtual reality.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Unconscious processing of facial race and emotional information.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Protective but Costly: The Impact of Behavioral Immune System Reactivity on Mental Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Association among cognitive emotion regulation strategies, psychological flexibility and subjective well-being in patients with breast cancer: a cross-sectional latent profile and mediation analysis.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2025Article
- Does it mean more positive or more negative? A study on central attitudes toward homosexuality.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Subregions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrate threat and protective information to meta-represent safety.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Adaptive Safety Coding in the Prefrontal Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The threat sensitivity scale: A brief self-report measure of dispositional sensitivity toward perceiving threats to physical harm.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Anger and disgust shape judgments of social sanctions across cultures, especially in high individual autonomy societies.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Memory Reflections of the Microbiota-Gut and Oligodendrocyte Axis.CNS & neurological disorders drug targets · 2024Review
- Article
- Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
51 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans likely evolved precautionary systems designed to minimize the threats to reproductive fitness posed by highly interdependent ultrasociality. A review of research on the self-protection and disease avoidance systems reveals that each system is functionally distinct and domain-specific: each is attuned to different cues; engages different emotions, inferences, and behavioral inclinations; and is rooted in somewhat different neurobiological substrates. These systems share important features, however. Each system is functionally coherent, in that perceptual, affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes work in concert to reduce fitness costs of potential threats. Each system is biased in a risk-averse manner, erring toward precautionary responses even when available cues only heuristically imply threat. And each system is functionally flexible, being highly sensitive to specific ecological and dispositional cues that signal greater vulnerability to the relevant threat. These features characterize a general template useful for understanding not only the self-protection and disease avoidance systems, but also a broader set of evolved, domain-specific precautionary systems.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.