Fig. 1.

a) Sample trial from the task completed during the study. A centrally presented face which could be fearful or neutral was flanked by two bars and presented for 200 ms. In alternate blocks participants were required to report the gender of the face or whether the flanking bars were aligned. b) Example sequence of trials from a single high-threat block of the task. Each trial displayed either a fearful (F) or neutral (N) face. The first three (start) trials were always of the same expression and in the remaining (continuation) trials the same expression was more common. All blocks were either high-threat as shown or low-threat, in which the neutral faces were more common.