The impact of the complexity of the experimental design on the ability to detect individual differences in fear learning

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

David Johnson^1,2 (davejohnson7@mac.com), Evelyn Arpi¹, Alexandra Tannenbaum¹; ¹York College (CUNY), ²The Graduate Center (CUNY)

Trait measures of negative emotionality have sometimes been shown to play a role in shaping fear learning, however, these effects have not been observed consistently. It’s been suggested that individual differences are more likely to surface in “strong” situations, referring to unambiguous experimental designs that uniformly guide response sets across individuals, and less likely to surface in “weak” situations, which are less well-defined events, where stimuli are more numerous and/or less predictable, leading to less uniform effects, heightened inter-individual variability and increased sensitivity to capture individual differences. However, minimal research has directly tested this idea in the context of fear learning. Here, we used a traditional Pavlovian fear learning design (n = 105) to test if individual difference effects are mediated by experimental complexity, which was manipulated by using a two-cue (strong) vs three-cue (weak) design. We observed a negative association between inhibitory Intolerance for Uncertainty (I-IU) and threat-safety discrimination in the weak, but not in the strong, situation. This data highlights several key takeaways. For one, fear researchers interested in studying individual differences should consider optimizing their studies for detection of individual differences by avoiding overly simplistic designs. Second, characteristics of the experimental design might constitute a crucial factor that can partly explain disparate individual differences results observed in the relevant literature. Finally, these findings may extend beyond fear/threat learning to other cognitive domains and paradigms. Further research will be needed to delineate precisely what elements of the experimental design this effect is dependent upon.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions