Automatic attention does not equal automatic fear: preferential attention without implicit valence

Theories of nonassociative fear acquisition hold that humans have an innate predisposition for some fears, such as fear of snakes and spiders. This predisposition may be mediated by an evolved fear module (Ohman & Mineka, 2001) that responds to basic perceptual features of threat stimuli by directing attention preferentially and generating an automatic fear response. Visual search and affective priming tasks were used to examine attentional processing and implicit evaluation of snake and spider pictures in participants with different explicit attitudes; controls (n = 25) and snake and spider experts (n = 23). Attentional processing and explicit evaluation were found to diverge; snakes and spiders were preferentially attended to by all participants; however, they were negative only for controls. Implicit evaluations of dangerous and nondangerous snakes and spiders, which have similar perceptual features, differed for expert participants, but not for controls. The authors suggest that although snakes and spiders are preferentially attended to, negative evaluations are not automatically elicited during this processing.