Fear, trust and Aborigines : The historical experience of state institutions and current encounters in the health system

Troubled dynamics between residents of an Aboriginal town in Queensland and the local health system were established during colonisation and consolidated during those periods of Australian history where the policies of 'protection' (segregation), integration and then assimilation held sway. The status of Aboriginal health is, in part, related to interactions between the residents' current and historical experiences of the health and criminal justice systems as together these agencies used medical and moral policing to legitimate dispossession, marginalisation, institutionalisation and control of the residents. The punitive regulations and ethnocentric strategies used by these institutions are within the living memory of many of the residents or in the published accounts of preceding generations. This paper explores current residents' memories and experiences.

Fear and danger in nocturnal urban environments

At the centre of this research is an ethnographic study that saw the researcher embedded within the fabric of inner city life to better understand what characteristics of user activity and interaction could be enhanced by technology. The initial research indicated that the experience of traversing the city after dark unified an otherwise divergent user group through a shared concern for personal safety. Managing this fear and danger represented an important user need. We found that mobile social networking systems are not only integral for bringing people together, they can help in the process of users safely dispersing as well. We conclude, however, that at a time when the average iPhone staggers under the weight of a plethora of apps that do everything from acting as a carpenter’s level to a pregnancy predictor, we consider the potential for the functionality of a personal safety device to be embodied within a stand alone artifact.

Workplace emotion : fear and anger

This original screen drama functioned as the stimulus in an audience response experiment, undertaken as part of research into workplace emotion. Commissioned and scripted by researchers at the University of Queensland and Griffith University, the film portrays the same narrative (a workplace conflict) twice, but played differently each time. The first version is intended to evince in viewers a fear response, and the second, an anger response. In preparing and rehearsing their performance choices, the actors utilised established taxonomies of fear and anger, in order to produce the optimum stimulus for conducting the experiment.

Attachment, fear of intimacy and differentiation of self among clients in substance disorder treatment facilities

Attachment, fear of intimacy and differentiation of self were examined by means of self-report questionnaires in 158 volunteers, including 99 clients enrolled in addiction treatment programs. As expected, clients (who were undergoing treatment for alcoholism, heroin addiction, amphetamine/cocaine addiction or cannabis abuse) reported higher levels of insecure attachment and fear of intimacy, and lower levels of secure attachment and differentiation of self, compared to controls. Insecure attachment, high fear of intimacy and low self-differentiation appear to characterize clients enrolled in addiction treatment programs. Such characteristics may reflect a predisposition to substance problems, an effect of chronic substance problems, or conceivably both.

Does emotion modulate the blink reflex in human conditioning? Startle potentiation during pleasant and unpleasant cues in the picture-picture paradigm

Emotional processes modulate the size of the eyeblink startle reflex in a picture-viewing paradigm, but it is unclear whether emotional processes are responsible for blink modulation in human conditioning. Experiment 1 involved an aversive differential conditioning phase followed by an extinction phase in which acoustic startle probes were presented during CS+, CS-, and intertrial intervals. Valence ratings and affective priming showed the CS+ was unpleasant postacquisition. Blink startle magnitude was larger during CS+ than during CS-. Experiment 2 used the same design in two groups trained with pleasant or unpleasant pictorial USs. Ratings and affective priming indicated that the CS+ had become pleasant or unpleasant in the respective group. Regardless of CS valence, blink startle was larger during CS+ than CS- in both groups. Thus, startle was not modulated by CS valence.

Affect, attention, or anticipatory arousal? Human blink startle modulation in forward and backward affective conditioning

Affect modulates the blink startle reflex in the picture-viewing paradigm, however, the process responsible for reflex modulation during conditional stimuli (CSs) that have acquired valence through affective conditioning remains unclear. In Experiment 1, neutral shapes (CSs) and valenced or neutral pictures (USs) were paired in a forward (CS → US) manner. Pleasantness ratings supported affective learning of positive and negative valence. Post-acquisition, blink reflexes were larger during the pleasant and unpleasant CSs than during the neutral CS. Rather than affect, attention or anticipatory arousal were suggested as sources of startle modulation. Experiment 2 confirmed that affective learning in the picture–picture paradigm was not affected by whether the CS preceded the US. Pleasantness ratings and affective priming revealed similar extents of affective learning following forward, backward or simultaneous pairings of CSs and USs. Experiment 3 utilized a backward conditioning procedure (US → CS) to minimize effects of US anticipation. Again, blink reflexes were larger during CSs paired with valenced USs regardless of US valence implicating attention rather than anticipatory arousal or affect as the process modulating startle in this paradigm.

On the resistance to extinction of fear conditioned to angry faces

The present study investigated whether, like fear conditioned to pictures of snakes and spiders, fear conditioned to angry faces resists extinction even after verbal instruction and removal of the shock electrode. Participants were trained in a differential Pavlovian fear conditioning procedure with angry face or happy face conditional stimuli (CSs). Prior to extinction, half the participants in each group were informed that no more unconditional stimuli would be presented and the shock electrode was removed. In the absence of this manipulation, participants showed resistance to extinction after training with angry face CSs, but not after training with happy face CSs. Instructed extinction and electrode removal abolished fear conditioning regardless of the emotion expressed by the CS faces. This finding suggests that fear conditioned to angry faces, like fear conditioned to racial out-group faces, is more malleable than fear conditioned to snakes and spiders.

The effect of emotional and attentional load on attentional startle modulation

The interactive effects of emotion and attention on attentional startle modulation were investigated in two experiments. Participants performed a discrimination and counting task with two visual stimuli during which acoustic eyeblink startle-eliciting probes were presented at long lead intervals. In Experiment 1, this task was combined with aversive Pavlovian conditioning. In Group Attend CS+, the attended stimulus was followed by an aversive unconditional stimulus (US) and the ignored stimulus was presented alone whereas the ignored stimulus was paired with the US in Group Attend CS−. In Experiment 2, a non-aversive reaction time task US replaced the aversive US. Regardless of the conditioning manipulation and consistent with a modality non-specific account of attentional startle modulation, startle magnitude was larger during attended than ignored stimuli in both experiments. Blink latency shortening was differentially affected by the conditioning manipulations suggesting additive effects of conditioning and discrimination and counting task on blink startle.

The relationship between self-reported animal fear and ERP modulation : Evidence for enhanced processing and fear of harmless invertebrates in snake- and spider-fearful individuals

The present study used ERPs to compare processing of fear-relevant (FR) animals (snakes and spiders) and non-fear-relevant (NFR) animals similar in appearance (worms and beetles). EEG was recorded from 18 undergraduate participants (10 females) as they completed two animal-viewing tasks that required simple categorization decisions. Participants were divided on a post hoc basis into low snake/spider fear and high snake/spider fear groups. Overall, FR animals were rated higher on fear and elicited a larger LPC. However, individual differences qualified these effects. Participants in the low fear group showed clear differentiation between FR and NFR animals on subjective ratings of fear and LPC modulation. In contrast, participants in the high fear group did not show such differentiation between FR and NFR animals. These findings suggest that the salience of feared-FR animals may generalize on both a behavioural and electro-cortical level to other animals of similar appearance but of a non-harmful nature.

Fear of Crime in Expatriate Australians in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam

This is an analytical report of a qualitative study of fear of crime in six Australian expatriates living in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) Vietnam. Addressing the primary question of what changes, or impacts upon, fear of crime in Australian expatriates in HCMC Vietnam, the research paid particular attention to studying the differences in fear of crime when respondents became expatriates, and the impact of incivilities and access to media. Each of the respondents indicated that they felt safer in Vietnam than in Australia. An analysis of the respondents’ responses indicates that this feeling of safety did not occur on arrival but after a short period of adjustment. The findings of this research support the existing theories on fear of crime and highlight the importance of context in predicting the impact of such factors as media and incivilities. The study has practical applications for both private and public sector organisations seeking to deploy staff to HCMC and adds to the current significant body of fear of crime research by specifically examining the issue of fear of crime amongst expatriates.

Established-outsider relations and fear of crime in mining towns

Using Elias and Scotson's (1994) account of established-outsider relations, this article examines how the organisational capacity of specific social groups is significant in determining the quality of crime-talk in isolated and rural settings. In particular, social 'oldness' and notions of what constitutes 'community' are significant in determining what activities and individuals are salient within crime-talk. Individual and gorup interviews, conducted in a West Australian mining town, revealed how crime-talk is an artefact of specific social figurations and the relative ability of groups to act as cohesive and integrated networks. We argue that anxieties regarding crime are a product of specific social figurations and the shifting power ratios of groups within such figurations.