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Welcome to this Padlet about instinct! Please watch the video as an introduction.

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Instincts can be defined as: inborn patterns of behavior, impulses, or a largely heritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a specific response.

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1. Instincts are innate (no learning experience is required)
2. Instincts are characteristic of a species (all members of that species can perform that behavior)
3. Instincts are responses to an environmental stimuli.

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Crying - one of many human instincts we show! (What stimuli trigger this instinct in babies?)

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Example of Instinct: Mating Rituals in Sticklebacks

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Example of Instinct: Mating Rituals in Sticklebacks

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Male sticklebacks (bright red color) perform a zigzag dance to attract a female stickleback and lead her back to his nest, where he then pokes at her tail and allows her to drop her eggs. The male fertilizes these eggs and takes care of the young. These actions are instinctive!

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Example of Instinct: Caring for Young in Bee Wolves 

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Example of Instinct: Caring for Young in Bee Wolves 

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Female bee wolves dig a nest in the ground, fly around the nest, catch a caterpillar, bring it back to the nest and lay an egg. This is an innate behavior!

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Background: Genetics of  Instinct-- some research!

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Background: Genetics of  Instinct-- some research!

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Female mice have an innate nurturing behavior to create a nest in a secure place, give birth to pups then bite off the amniotic sac and eat the placenta, then carry those pups to the nest.

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However, when researchers create a mutation in mice that gets rid of the fosB gene, these mice no longer show any nurturing instincts (and their young die of cold/starvation/neglect).
This demonstrates that the fosB gene product in some way contributes instinctive female nurturing behavior.

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Our Main Research Question: Fear in Humans - is this a learned behavior or is it instinctive?

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Our Main Research Question: Fear in Humans - is this a learned behavior or is it instinctive?

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Early behaviorist hypothesis says fear is LEARNED, not instinctive:

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Early behaviorist hypothesis says fear is LEARNED, not instinctive:

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The behaviorist theory is that humans are born blank slates and that fear is learned. Consider John Watson's study on Little Albert, and how he conditioned fear in Albert. He claimed that all of our behaviors--including fear--are completely learned!
But, now we understand that we are not just "blank slates." We have predispositions to learn some tasks, to fear some stimuli! We know that many of our behaviors, including fear, are likely NOT learned, but have an innate or instinctive component.  Please read on to learn more about our main research question: Is fear instinctive in humans?

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But, could Fear in humans be instinctive? 

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But, could Fear in humans be instinctive? 

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Why do so many people show a fear of heights, open spaces, the dark, closed spaces, etc.? Could these fears be instincts (and not learned)?
In the following slides, we will present evidence for a fear-module in primates that may also be found in humans.

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The Fear Module (Ohman and Mineka, 2001)

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The Fear Module (Ohman and Mineka, 2001)

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Ohman and Mineka (2001) proposed a fear module to explain instinctive fear in humans:
-A module in our brains that is automatically activated upon fear triggering stimuli.
-Once fear is activated, it is hard to reason logically to try to terminate this fear.
-There is a dedicated region in the amygdala for the fear module.
-People are predisposed to learn about fear-relevant stimuli (it's easier to learn to fear a snake as opposed to a flower!)

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Evidence for the Fear Module (Ohman and Minkeka, 2001):

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Evidence for the Fear Module (Ohman and Minkeka, 2001):

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Participants were shown pictures of both fear-inducing stimuli (snakes, spiders) and fear-irrelevant stimuli (flowers, houses). Skin conductance response (SRC) - the phenomenon that skin is a better conductor of heat when faced with an arousing stimuli - was used to measure fear. Participants showed a quicker and more intense reaction to fear-inducing stimuli (phobic as CS+ in figure on next slide) than to the fear irrelevant stimuli (neutral as CS+)
This study demonstrates an innate predisposition to fear some stimuli more than others!
Ohman & Mineka, 2001.

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More Evidence for the Fear Module (Cook and Mineka, 1990): 

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More Evidence for the Fear Module (Cook and Mineka, 1990): 

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Rhesus monkeys who grew up in the wild show a fear of snakes, while rhesus monkeys who grew up in a lab do not show as much fear.
However, monkeys who grew up in the lab initially fear toy snakes MORE than flowers. And, once they watched the wild-reared monkeys interact fearfully with snakes and calmly with non-fearful objects (or vice versa), they began to acquire a stronger fear of snakes themselves. They did not acquire a stronger fear of flowers, however (Cook & Mineka, 1990)!

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This figure shows that after watching wild-reared monkeys show fear of a flower or a fear of snakes, the lab-reared monkeys fear of flowers increases, but not nearly as much as the fear of toy snakes.

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Three macaque monkeys (Shiba, Ume, and Pero) were presented with 3x3 matrixes containing either 8 fear-inducing pictures and 1 neutral picture, or 8 neutral pictures and 1 fear-inducing picture. The neutral pictures were koalas, while the fear-inducing pictures were either snakes or spiders. The monkeys had to locate the deviant picture out of the array (Kawai & Koda, 2016) (see next slide)

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Arrays of 9 pictures (8 of which "match" and 1 of which is the deviant picture). Monkeys had to find and point to the deviant picture in this task.

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The monkeys found the deviant picture more quickly when it was a snake surrounded by pictures of koalas (as opposed to a koala surrounded by pictures of snakes). This suggests that macaque monkeys have a visual sensitivity for snakes!
But, the same cannot be said for when the deviant picture was a spider, suggesting that macaque monkeys do not have a visual sensitivity to spiders and may not find them dangerous in the wild.

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Watch this short video for the conclusion!

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Cook, M., and Mineka, S. 1990. Selective associations in the observational conditioning of fear in rhesus monkeys. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 16(4): 372-389.

Garcia, R. 2017. Neurobiology of fear and specific phobias. Learning and Memory 24(9): 462-471.

Kawai, N., and Koda, H. 2016. Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata) quickly detect snakes but not spiders: evolutionary origins of fear-relevant animals. Journal of Comparative Psychology130(3) 299-303.

Ohman, A., Flykt, A., and Esteves, F. 2001. Emotion drives attention: detecting the snake in the grass. Journal of Experimental Psychology 103 (3): 466-478.

Ohman, A., and Mineka, S. 2001. Fears, phobias, and preparedness: toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review 108 (3): 483-522.

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Kawai, N., and Koda, H. 2016. Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata) quickly detect snakes but not spiders: evolutionary origins of fear-relevant animals. Journal of Comparative Psychology130(3) 299-303.

Contributor: Jenny Jenkins

Researchers investigated whether macaque monkeys have an evolved fear module to help them visually identify threats and make them predisposed to learn to associate fear with threatening stimuli, specifically snakes and spiders. Kawai and Koda presented 3 monkeys (raised in captivity) with an array of 9 animal pictures on it: eight were pictures of one species and 1 was a “deviant” picture of a different animal. In one experiment, the deviant picture was a snake among non-threatening koalas, or the reverse (with the deviant being the koala). In the second experiment, the deviant picture was a spider among non-threatening koalas, or the reverse. Monkeys had to find the deviant picture and their response time was recorded. Researchers found that monkeys were faster at detecting deviant snakes than deviant koalas. But, monkeys were not faster at detecting deviant spiders over deviant koalas. Finally, monkeys found deviant snakes more quickly than deviant spiders. Researchers conclude that monkeys may be visually sensitive to snakes and predisposed to learn to fear snake threats. But, monkeys were not predisposed to find (and fear) spiders from among fear-irrelevant stimuli. The results suggest that over evolutionary history, spiders may not have been an important threat to monkeys. This study is interesting because it teaches us about possible differences between monkey and human fear modules, and suggests that monkeys and humans respond differently to spiders because of our different evolutionary histories. But, this study used only a small sample of 3 adult monkeys that were raised in captivity; therefore, these monkeys may not reflect the bigger population of wild macaques, and as adults, may have modulated fear modules because of prior experiences with fear-relevant stimuli.