The use of stimulus dimensions in judgement making in spider fearful and nonfearful individuals

This study uses a multidimensional scaling approach to investigate the hypo thesis that spider fearful individuals give priority to a threat-safety dim ension when making judgments. The results show that when making judgments a bout stimuli, spider fearful individuals (1) placed significantly greater c omparative weighting on a threat-relevant dimension than on a non-emotive d imension (colour), and (2) tended to rate threatening pairs of stimuli and safe pairs of stimuli as more similar than did the nonfearful group. This p rioritised dimensional processing suggests a mechanism by which phobics can exhibit what initially appear to be paradoxical tendencies to give priorit y to both threat and safety information. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.