Primed lexical decision task in fearful and nonfearful individuals.

Participants were 32 spider-fearful, 33 blood-injury-injection-fearful, and 28 nonfearful individuals (N = 93) who took part in a primed lexical decision task (LDT) and who were presented with blood-, spider-, neutral-, positive-, and pseudo-word stimuli. Participants decided whether 1 or both words in a word pair were real English words or nonwords; if both were real words, participants responded one way, and if 1 or more of the stimuli were nonwords, participants responded a different way. Participants responded to nonword-nonword stimuli faster than to other stimuli pairs. In addition, participants in all groups responded to fear-related stimuli pairs faster than to other nonfearful word stimuli. However, there were no group main or interaction effects. Results suggest that the primed LDT may not be sensitive in detecting lexical processing biases toward threat in these groups.