Fear and Trust in the Laboratory

This breakout session will be part lecture and part discussion. We will focus on ways in which fear is conceptualized and operationalized in experimental psychology. I will begin by providing detailed examples from my own research in which we use virtual environments to place participants in physically or socially threatening situations. I will also describe how both subjective and physiological data can gauge emotional responses within those environments. We will use these examples as a launching point for a broader group discussion on the manipulation and measurement of fear in the laboratory, examining how existing approaches might address (or fail to address) the nature of fear in the “real world.” Finally, we will brainstorm about methods to examine the interplay between fear and trust.