Fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes and spiders are thought to capture attention due to evolutionary significance. Classical conditioning experiments indicate that these stimuli accelerate learning, while instructed extinction experiments suggest they may be less responsive to instructions. We manipulated stimulus type during instructed aversive…

Previous studies suggested that the beta-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol might be a novel, potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This hypothesis stemmed mainly from rodent studies showing that propranolol interferes with the reconsolidation of Pavlovian fear conditioning (FC). However, subsequent investigations…

Null hypotheses are simple, precise, and theoretically important. Conventional statistical analysis cannot support them; Bayesian analysis can. The challenge in a Bayesian analysis is to formulate a suitably vague alternative, because the vaguer the alternative is (the more it spreads out the unit mass of prior probability), the more the null is…

In two human skin conductance conditioning experiments we investigated whether processing of stimulus compounds can be influenced by past experience. Participants were either pre-trained with a discrimination problem that could be solved elementally (A+, B-, AB+, C- in Experiment 1 and A+, AB+, C-, CB- in Experiment 2) or one that required a…

Four experiments gave direct tests of a popular hypothesis about the role of classical conditioning in person perception and social judgment. (Editor)