ArticleScientific reports2020
Observational learning of fear in real time procedure.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- How observing others influences the subsequent acquisition of fear of bodily sensations.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2026Article
- Understanding Others' Distress Through Past Experiences: The Role of Memory Engram Cells in Observational Fear.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Review
- Rats respond to aversive emotional arousal of human handlers with the activation of the basolateral and central amygdala.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Learning via instructions about observations: exploring similarities and differences with learning via actual observations.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Social network sites as learning environments and their implications for mental health.Frontiers in digital health · 2022Article
- Watch and Learn: Vicarious Threat Learning across Human Development.Brain sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Learning to avoid threats often occurs by observing others. Most previous research on observational fear learning (OFL) in humans has used pre-recorded standardized video of an actor and thus lacked ecological validity. Here, we aimed to enhance ecological validity of the OFL by engaging participants in a real-time observational procedure (35 pairs of healthy male friends, age 18-27). One of the participants watched the other undergo a differential fear conditioning task, in which a conditioned stimulus (CS+) was paired with an aversive electric shock and another stimulus (CS-) was always safe. Subsequently, the CS+ and CS- were presented to the observer to test the OFL. While the friend's reactions to the shock elicited strong skin conductance responses (SCR) in all observers, subsequent differential SCRs (CS+ > CS-) were found only when declarative knowledge of the CS+/US contingency (rated by the participants) was acquired. Contingency-aware observers also showed elevated fear potentiated startle responses during both CS+ and CS- compared to baseline. We conclude that our real-time procedure can be effectively used to study OFL. The procedure allowed for dissecting two components of the OFL: an automatic emotional reaction to the response of the demonstrator and learning about stimulus contingency.
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