Does Fear Affect Inhibitory Control? Insights From a Virtual Reality Height Exposure Paradigm

When faced with a dangerous situation, our ability to utilize effortful executive processes to make adaptive choices can be the difference between life and death. In the presence of a threat, we know that we experience a power emotional state called fear, which increases our heart rate and orients our attention towards the threat (Bradley et al., 2001). Whether fear enhances our ability to use effortful executive processes (e.g., inhibitory control) or impairs them, however, is still unclear. For example, inhibitory control, or our ability to suppress automatic or habitual responses that do not correspond to a current goal (Diamond, 2013), can be both enhanced (Pessoa et al., 2012) and impaired (Verbruggen & De Houwer, 2007) by fear. These opposing findings raise the question: how does fear influence inhibitory control? Most research investigating the effects of fear on inhibitory control uses fear stimuli instead of fear states. Inducing fear states is a more ecologically valid way to investigate fear compared to displaying fear-inducing stimuli. Using a previously validated fear state induction in virtual reality (Maymon et al., 2024), the current study exposed participants to extreme heights while they completed a go/no-go task. Relative to a control condition (during which participants completed the same task in virtual reality, without being exposed to heights) participants at height were equivalent in performance on the go/no-go task, suggesting that fear did not influence inhibitory control. However, this study is unable to draw strong conclusions because fear responses (indexed by increased heart rate and skin conductance, and higher self-reported ratings of fear) were not maintained throughout the task. While this meant that the question “does fear influence inhibitory control?” remains open, the findings from this thesis provide directions that future research into this question can take.