Defensive system activation promotes heightened perception of threat signals, and
excessive attention to threat signals has been discussed as a contributory factor in the
etiology of anxiety disorders. However, a mechanistic account of attentional modulation
during fear-relevant processes, especially during fear generalization remains elusive. To
test the hypothesis that social fear generalization prompts sharpened tuning in the
visuocortical representation of social threat cues, 67 healthy participants underwent …