Emotional Factors in Time-to-Contact Estimation E Brendel, H Hecht |
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Department of Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany
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| Recently, the emotional content of a looming stimulus has been shown to affect time-to-contact estimation. A threatening stimulus is judged to arrive sooner compared to a neutral stimulus, possibly buying the organism time to prepare defensive actions. We investigated which aspect of the emotional stimulus content drives this effect: Is the specific valence of fear necessary for the effect, or does mere unspecific arousal speed up the reactions? We show that for healthy subjects, in a context of equally arousing stimuli, time-to-contact judgments of threatening pictures did not differ from those with positive valence. However, spider-fearful observers judged looming pictures of spiders and a frontally attacking dog, snake, or human to arrive earlier than both neutral and positively arousing pictures. Judgments of a broader range of positively and negatively arousing pictures revealed that pictures with positive valence are judged to arrive earliest (least overestimation) at a medium level of arousal. In contrast, for pictures with negative valence, a linear trend emerged: The more arousing the picture, the sooner it was judged to arrive. These results are in line with the ecologically reframed Yerkes-Dodson Law: The effect of arousal on time-to-contact judgments depends on the evolutionary relevance of the looming stimulus. |
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