Arne Öhman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4232263 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arne Öhman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Arne |
| FAMILY NAME | Öhman |
| SIGNATURE | ÖHMAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Karolinska Institutet |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Recognizing masked threat: Fear betrays, but disgust you can trust
If emotions guide consciousness, people may recognize degraded objects in center view more accurately if they either fear the objects or are disgusted by them. Therefore, we studied whether recognition of spiders and snakes correlates with individual differences in spider fear, snake fear, and disgust sensitivity. Female students performed a recognition task with pictures of spiders, snakes, flowers, and mushrooms as well as blanks. Pictures were…
Making sense of emotion: Evolution, reason & the brain
We often dene the basic goals of human striving in terms of emotion: we yearn for happiness and do our utmost to avoid misery. 1 But making the distinction between positive and negative emotions is not as simple as saying that we seek the former and shun the latter. Emotions often have a will of their own and may resist attempts to be disciplined. Victims of wartime atrocities and natural disasters, for example, may unwillingly suffer from involu…
Looking for Foes and Friends: Perceptual and Emotional Factors When Finding a Face in the Crowd
In a face-in-the-crowd setting, the authors examined visual search for photographically reproduced happy, angry, and fearful target faces among neutral distractor faces in 3 separate experiments. Contrary to the hypothesis, happy targets were consistently detected more quickly and accurately than angry and fearful targets, as were directed compared with averted targets. There was no consistent effect of social anxiety. A facial emotion recognitio…
Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness
Fear and the Amygdala: Manipulation of Awareness Generates Differential Cerebral Responses to Phobic and Fear-Relevant (but Nonfeared) Stimuli
Rapid response to danger holds an evolutionary advantage. In this positron emission tomography study, phobics were exposed to masked visual stimuli with timings that either allowed awareness or not of either phobic, fear-relevant (e.g., spiders to snake phobics), or neutral images. When the timing did not permit awareness, the amygdala responded to both phobic and fear-relevant stimuli. With time for more elaborate processing, phobic stimuli resu…
The Facilitated Processing of Threatening Faces: An ERP Analysis
Threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were presented to test the hypothesis of the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Dense sensor event-related brain potentials were measured while subjects viewed facial stimuli. Subjects had no explicit task for emotional categorization of the faces. Assessing early perceptual stimulus processing, threatening faces elicited an early posterior negativity compared with nonthreatening neutr…
The Malicious Serpent: Snakes as a Prototypical Stimulus for an Evolved Module of Fear
As reptiles, snakes may have signified deadly threats in the environment of early mammals. We review findings suggesting that snakes remain special stimuli for humans. Intense snake fear is prevalent in both humans and other primates. Humans and monkeys learn snake fear more easily than fear of most other stimuli through direct or vicarious conditioning. Neither the elicitation nor the conditioning of snake fear in humans requires that snakes be …
Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning.
An evolved module for fear elicitation and fear learning with 4 characteristics is proposed. (a) The fear module is preferentially activated in aversive contexts by stimuli that are fear relevant in an evolutionary perspective. (b) Its activation to such stimuli is automatic. (c) It is relatively impenetrable to cognitive control. (d) It originates in a dedicated neural circuitry, centered on the amygdala. Evidence supporting these propositions i…
Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass.
Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spiders) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the same category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa.Fearrelevant pictures were found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones.Fear-relevant, but not fear-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the display and by the number of distractors, which suggests parallel search for fe…
The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli
Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hypothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. Using a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results consistently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than friendly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the co…
Face the Beast and Fear the Face: Animal and Social Fears as Prototypes for Evolutionary Analyses of Emotion
This paper applies a functional‐evolutionary perspective to fear in the context of encounters with animals and threatening humans. It is argued that animal fear originates in a predatory defense system whose function is to allow animals to avoid and escape predators. Animal stimuli are postulated to be differentially prepared to become learned elicitors of fear within this system. Social fears are viewed as originating in a dominance/submissivene…
Modeling processes in the acquisition of fears: Vicarious electrodermal conditioning to fear-relevant stimuli
Fear-relevant (snakes, spiders, and rats) and fear-irrelevant (flowers, mushrooms, and berries) pictures were compared as conditioned and instigating stimuli in a vicarious classical conditioning paradigm with skin conductance responses as the dependent variable. A female confederate model and subject watched the pictures side by side. A female stimulus presentations, the experimenter interrupted to investigate alleged overreactions of the model …
Facial expressions as conditioned stimuli for electrodermal responses: "A case of "preparedness
Converging data suggest that human facial behavior has an evolutionary basis. Combining these data with Seligman's preparedness theory, it was predicted that facial expressions of anger should be more readily associated with aversive events than should expressions of happiness. Two experiments involving differential electrodermal conditioning to pictures of faces, with electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus, were performed. In the first exp…
Locus of control and habituation of the electrodermal orienting response to nonsignal and signal stimuli
The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli
Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hypothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. Using a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results consistently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than friendly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the co…
Facial expressions as conditioned stimuli for electrodermal responses: "A case of "preparedness
Converging data suggest that human facial behavior has an evolutionary basis. Combining these data with Seligman's preparedness theory, it was predicted that facial expressions of anger should be more readily associated with aversive events than should expressions of happiness. Two experiments involving differential electrodermal conditioning to pictures of faces, with electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus, were performed. In the first exp…
Making sense of emotion: Evolution, reason & the brain
We often dene the basic goals of human striving in terms of emotion: we yearn for happiness and do our utmost to avoid misery. 1 But making the distinction between positive and negative emotions is not as simple as saying that we seek the former and shun the latter. Emotions often have a will of their own and may resist attempts to be disciplined. Victims of wartime atrocities and natural disasters, for example, may unwillingly suffer from involu…
Modeling processes in the acquisition of fears: Vicarious electrodermal conditioning to fear-relevant stimuli
Fear-relevant (snakes, spiders, and rats) and fear-irrelevant (flowers, mushrooms, and berries) pictures were compared as conditioned and instigating stimuli in a vicarious classical conditioning paradigm with skin conductance responses as the dependent variable. A female confederate model and subject watched the pictures side by side. A female stimulus presentations, the experimenter interrupted to investigate alleged overreactions of the model …
Locus of control and habituation of the electrodermal orienting response to nonsignal and signal stimuli
Modeling processes in the acquisition of fears: Vicarious electrodermal conditioning to fear-relevant stimuli
Fear-relevant (snakes, spiders, and rats) and fear-irrelevant (flowers, mushrooms, and berries) pictures were compared as conditioned and instigating stimuli in a vicarious classical conditioning paradigm with skin conductance responses as the dependent variable. A female confederate model and subject watched the pictures side by side. A female stimulus presentations, the experimenter interrupted to investigate alleged overreactions of the model …
Facial expressions as conditioned stimuli for electrodermal responses: "A case of "preparedness
Converging data suggest that human facial behavior has an evolutionary basis. Combining these data with Seligman's preparedness theory, it was predicted that facial expressions of anger should be more readily associated with aversive events than should expressions of happiness. Two experiments involving differential electrodermal conditioning to pictures of faces, with electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus, were performed. In the first exp…
Face the Beast and Fear the Face: Animal and Social Fears as Prototypes for Evolutionary Analyses of Emotion
This paper applies a functional‐evolutionary perspective to fear in the context of encounters with animals and threatening humans. It is argued that animal fear originates in a predatory defense system whose function is to allow animals to avoid and escape predators. Animal stimuli are postulated to be differentially prepared to become learned elicitors of fear within this system. Social fears are viewed as originating in a dominance/submissivene…
Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning.
An evolved module for fear elicitation and fear learning with 4 characteristics is proposed. (a) The fear module is preferentially activated in aversive contexts by stimuli that are fear relevant in an evolutionary perspective. (b) Its activation to such stimuli is automatic. (c) It is relatively impenetrable to cognitive control. (d) It originates in a dedicated neural circuitry, centered on the amygdala. Evidence supporting these propositions i…
Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass.
Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spiders) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the same category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa.Fearrelevant pictures were found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones.Fear-relevant, but not fear-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the display and by the number of distractors, which suggests parallel search for fe…
The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli
Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hypothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. Using a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results consistently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than friendly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the co…
The Malicious Serpent: Snakes as a Prototypical Stimulus for an Evolved Module of Fear
As reptiles, snakes may have signified deadly threats in the environment of early mammals. We review findings suggesting that snakes remain special stimuli for humans. Intense snake fear is prevalent in both humans and other primates. Humans and monkeys learn snake fear more easily than fear of most other stimuli through direct or vicarious conditioning. Neither the elicitation nor the conditioning of snake fear in humans requires that snakes be …
Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness
Fear and the Amygdala: Manipulation of Awareness Generates Differential Cerebral Responses to Phobic and Fear-Relevant (but Nonfeared) Stimuli
Rapid response to danger holds an evolutionary advantage. In this positron emission tomography study, phobics were exposed to masked visual stimuli with timings that either allowed awareness or not of either phobic, fear-relevant (e.g., spiders to snake phobics), or neutral images. When the timing did not permit awareness, the amygdala responded to both phobic and fear-relevant stimuli. With time for more elaborate processing, phobic stimuli resu…
The Facilitated Processing of Threatening Faces: An ERP Analysis
Threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were presented to test the hypothesis of the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Dense sensor event-related brain potentials were measured while subjects viewed facial stimuli. Subjects had no explicit task for emotional categorization of the faces. Assessing early perceptual stimulus processing, threatening faces elicited an early posterior negativity compared with nonthreatening neutr…
Looking for Foes and Friends: Perceptual and Emotional Factors When Finding a Face in the Crowd
In a face-in-the-crowd setting, the authors examined visual search for photographically reproduced happy, angry, and fearful target faces among neutral distractor faces in 3 separate experiments. Contrary to the hypothesis, happy targets were consistently detected more quickly and accurately than angry and fearful targets, as were directed compared with averted targets. There was no consistent effect of social anxiety. A facial emotion recognitio…
Making sense of emotion: Evolution, reason & the brain
We often dene the basic goals of human striving in terms of emotion: we yearn for happiness and do our utmost to avoid misery. 1 But making the distinction between positive and negative emotions is not as simple as saying that we seek the former and shun the latter. Emotions often have a will of their own and may resist attempts to be disciplined. Victims of wartime atrocities and natural disasters, for example, may unwillingly suffer from involu…
Recognizing masked threat: Fear betrays, but disgust you can trust
If emotions guide consciousness, people may recognize degraded objects in center view more accurately if they either fear the objects or are disgusted by them. Therefore, we studied whether recognition of spiders and snakes correlates with individual differences in spider fear, snake fear, and disgust sensitivity. Female students performed a recognition task with pictures of spiders, snakes, flowers, and mushrooms as well as blanks. Pictures were…
Psychology (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (13 works) · Neuroscience (10 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (6 works) · Amygdala (5 works) · Communication (5 works) · Developmental psychology (5 works) · Memory and Neural Mechanisms (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works)