Incident experience predicts freezing-like responses in firefighters
article
Freezing is a defensive response to acute stress that is associated with coping and alterations in attentional processing. However, it remains unclear whether individuals in high risk professions, who are skilled at making rapid decisions in emergency situations, show altered threat-induced freezing. Here we investigated the effect of incident experience in a high risk profession on freezing. Additionally, we explored whether any effect of incident experience on freezing would be different for profession-related and -unrelated threat. Forty experienced and inexperienced firefighters were presented neutral, pleasant, related-unpleasant, and unrelated-unpleasant pictures in a passive viewing task. Postural sway and heart rate were assessed to determine freezing. Both postural and heart rate data evidenced reduced freezing upon unpleasant pictures in the experienced versus the inexperienced group. Relatedness of the unpleasant pictures did not modulate these effects. These findings indicate that higher incident experience relates to decreased threat-induced freezing, at least in a passive task context. This might suggest that primary defense responses are malleable through experience. Finally, these findings demonstrate the potential of using animal to human translational approaches to investigate defensive behaviors in relation to incident experience in high risk professions and stimulate future research on the role of freezing in resilience and coping. © 2017 Ly et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Topics
TNO Identifier
781913
ISSN
19326203
Source
PLoS ONE, 12(10)
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Article nr.
e0186648