Can people’s responses to fear conditioning paradigms be differentiated by their level of anxiety? The quasi-experiment Participants reported demographic information (age, gender) before completing the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (Hamilton, 1959). Next, participants were instructed to wear a headset or headphones with the volume set to maximum. The task required participants to focus on a black central fixation dot presented against a white background for 10 seconds. From this point, one of 16 smileys with neutral expressions (8 yellow, 8 blue) were presented for five seconds, before the screen reverted to the fixation dot for 10 seconds. Stimuli are included below for reference. Four seconds after a blue smiley was presented, a 75dB, 440hZ beep was played. No noise was played while yellow faces were presented. The order of trials was randomised. After completing the task, participants were directed to close the task window. They were then asked to complete a brief survey measure, rating the fear/anxiety they felt when considering each smiley, using a 0 (least fearful/least anxiety-provoking) to 10 (most fearful/most anxiety-provoking) response scale. For data analysis, participants were categorised based existing cut-off scores for the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale. The absolute value of the difference between ratings was computed.
