“Prepared” fear or socio‐cultural learning? Fear conditioned to guns, snakes, and spiders is eliminated by instructed extinction in a within‐participant differential fear conditioning paradigm

Across three experiments, we investigated whether electrodermal responses conditioned to ontogenetic fear‐relevant (pointed guns) and phylogenetic fear‐relevant stimuli (snakes and spiders) would resist instructed extinction in a within‐participant differential fear conditioning paradigm. Instructed extinction involves informing participants before extinction that the unconditional stimulus (US) will no longer be presented. This manipulation has...