Indeed, suggestive empirical evidence for this hypothesis has been presented by the findings of a previous study concerning snake fear that were obtained with the textual emotional Stroop paradigm. Darwin has already claimed the possibility, stating that ‘fear often acts at first as a powerful stimulant’, and that ‘a man or animal driven through terror of desperation, is endowed with wonderful strength’. According to this hypothesis, one can predict that viewing images of snakes would accelerate making judgements of their colour. However, given the recent findings that snake recognition can even occur in humans prior to awareness, the possibility of the opposite prediction arises evolved dangerous stimuli should be more rapidly and less cognitively responded to.
Ĭonsidering these findings, one may be led to reason from a psychopathological perspective that humans would need to spend more time to make judgements about the colour of images of snakes than they would need to make judgements about the colour of images of neutral stimuli such as flowers. The existence of neurons that respond selectively to snake images has been reported in macaque monkeys. More recent studies have documented that preschool children, 8- to 14-month-old infants, and even non-human primates also detect snakes more quickly than flowers.
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Evidence supporting that notion included a series of investigations that showed that human adults have an attentional bias for the detection of fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes compared to neutral stimuli, such as flowers and mushrooms. In a comprehensive analysis of the origin of the human visual system, the author discussed the possibility that some of its basic properties evolved precisely because they facilitated the detection of snakes. An even stronger version of such an argument was published recently. In humans, too, snake-phobia is regarded as a phenomenon that is widespread throughout the world. This is typically the case for their response to venomous snakes. Indeed, most non-human primates are known to have evolved an innate predisposition to quickly associate fear with some specific threatening stimuli. This is considered to be related to the fact that reacting defensively in fearful situations is crucial to the survival of all animal species, including humans. Moreover, more anxious participants are likely to be slower at that colour-naming. As a consequence, participants are likely to exhibit delayed colour-naming for words related to their current concerns, and these concerns are most often threat-related. Delays in judgements of colour, or Stroop interference, has been said to occur when the naming of the word captures the participant's attention despite the participant's attempt to attend to its colour. In this paradigm, phobic participants are asked to make judgements of the colour of presented textual words that vary in personal, emotional significance. Perhaps the most typical experimental testing of this notion has been performed using the emotional Stroop paradigm developed by psychopathologists. Concerning these issues, one of the notions prevalent among psychologists is that due to limited attentional capacity, prioritization of emotional stimuli processing induces deleterious effects on task performance. In particular, the manner by which processing emotional visual stimuli produces these effects is of great interest. There have been increasing reports about influences exerted by emotion upon behaviour.