Neutral Face Breaks Suppression Faster After Aversive Learning

Numerous studies have found that threatening information can capture our attention faster and gain preferential access,such as snakes,fearful faces,erotic images and so on.Thus,it can be seen that emotional stimulus plays a very important role in the long evolutionary history for human survival and reproduction.Many researchers have discovered that a previously conditioned stimulus acquires preferential access in perception after repeatedly pairing with a unconditioned stimulus,namely aversive conditioning.In our experiments, continuous flash suppression paradigm was used to investigate neutral face's conditioning learning.Experiment 1 was divided into 3 parts:pre-test phase,learning phase and post-test phase.And differential classical conditioning paradigm was used only in the learning phase,one neutral face is repeatedly paired with a negative image,while the other neutral face appears simultaneously with one neutral picture.During the testing phase,the suppression time(ST) was recorded for further analysis.Ours results show that the neutral face pairing with negative images breaks suppression faster and greater skin conductance fluctuations.In Experiment 2, the written instructional learning was adopted in learning phase:one neutral face is paired with'the wanted man'for 20 times,CS+,and the other neutral face was never paired with 'the wanted man',CS-.And in the post-test,the suppression time was tested.As we have excepted participants response significantly faster to the wanted man's face than the other neutral face.It meant that the wanted man's face,as a social danger information,can automatically capture our attention even without awareness.Our results suggest that neutral face can break suppression faster in continuous flash suppression after sversive conditioning.