Citation

Hornstein EA, Eisenberger NI. PLoS One 2017; 12(5): e0175891.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Life Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States of America.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0175891

PMID

28463999

Abstract

Social support is associated with positive health outcomes, and research has demonstrated that the presence, or even just a reminder, of a social-support figure can reduce psychological and physiological responses to threats. However, the mechanisms underlying this effect are unclear, and no previous work has examined the impact of social support on basic fear learning processes, which have implications for threat responding. This study examined whether social support inhibits the formation of fear associations. After conducting a fear-conditioning procedure in which social-support stimuli were paired with conditional stimuli during fear acquisition, we found that the threat of shock was not associated with conditional stimuli paired with images of social-support figures, but was associated with stimuli paired with images of strangers. These findings indicate that social support prevents the formation of fear associations, reducing the amount of learned fears people acquire as they navigate the world, consequently reducing threat-related stress.

Language: en