Interestingly, the immersion results revealed that beyond and independent from the effects of pain catastrophizing, the effect of threat on verbal pain report and facial expression was dependent on social context and vice versa.
In a study designed to see whether incentives could overcome stereotype threat in mathematics tests, Fryer Levitt and List (2008) could not replicate the stereotype threat, finding instead a modest facilitation effect of threat for males and females.
There was also a main effect of Threat Word Location, indicating that threat words presented in the top (attended) location were followed by faster responses to subsequent probes than threat words presented in the bottom (unattended) location, regardless of probe location, F 1,55) = 7.64, p<0.01.
Various mechanisms might be responsible for a response slowing effect of threat cues.
Thus, any RT slowing effect of threat is likely to be constant across all critical trials.
Strikingly, we observed a linear positive effect of threat level on BOLD responses in the left anterior hippocampus.
Interestingly, the effect of threat under low efficacy is borderline significant and negative, suggesting that high threat may decrease behaviour when efficacy is low.
Indeed, when we ran random effects models, almost half the heterogeneity in the effect sizes of the threat main effect and the effect of threat under low efficacy were explained by heterogeneity (see Table 3).
However, this contrast may be confounded by a response slowing effect of threat, which is conceptually distinct from effects of attentional cueing.
The direct effect of level of integration on satisfaction is not significant (p = 0.057), but the effect of threat on satisfaction is significant (p <0.001) (Table 6 ).
However, these analyses took no account of the possible existence of a RT slowing effect of threat cues, which was confirmed on the central cue task.
