Incidental learning of faces during threat: No evidence for enhanced physiological responses to former threat identities.

Remembering an unfamiliar person and the contextual conditions of that encounter is important for adaptive future behavior, especially in a potentially dangerous situation. Initiating defensive behavior in the presence of former dangerous circumstances can be crucial. Recent studies showed selective electrocortical processing of faces that were previously seen in a threat context compared to a safety context, however, this was not reflected in conscious recognition performance.

Social threat and safety learning in individuals with adverse childhood experiences: electrocortical evidence on face processing, recognition, and working memory.

Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are often associated with stress and anxiety-related disorders in adulthood, and learning and memory deficits have been suggested as a potential link between ACEs and psychopathology.

Objective: In this preregistered study, the impact of social threat learning on the processing, encoding, and recognition of unknown faces as well as their contextual settings was measured by recognition performance and event-related brain potentials.

Method: Sixty-four individuals with ACEs encoded neutral faces within threatening or safe context conditions.

Aversive anticipations modulate electrocortical correlates of decision-making and reward reversal learning, but not behavioral performance.

Predicting the consequences of one's own decisions is crucial for organizing future behavior. However, when reward contingencies vary frequently, flexible adaptation of decisions is likely to depend on the situation. We examined the effects of an instructed threat context on choice behavior (i.

The mere sight of loved ones does not inhibit psychophysiological defense mechanisms when threatened.

Looking at pictures of loved ones, such as one's romantic partner or good friends, has been shown to alleviate the experience of pain and reduce defensive reactions. However, little is known about such modulatory effects on threat and safety learning and the psychophysiological processes involved. Here, we explored the hypothesis that beloved faces serve as implicit safety cues and attenuate the expression of fear responses and/or accelerate extinction learning in a threatening context.