Baseline no-regulation (experience) phase
pain, shock
SHOCKS, SHOCK
Following calibration, participants performed two 30-trials baseline no-regulation (experience) blocks: a fear of shocks block followed by a fear of unpleasant pictures block.For the fear of shocks block, participants were told that in each trial, they will be at risk of receiving an electric shock. While anticipating a possible shock, they were asked to implement an “experience” instruction, namely, to allow natural thoughts and feelings (such as fear, tension, etc.) to arise, without blocking or changing what they feel. In trials where they receive an electric shock, they were asked to continue implementing the experience instruction, namely, to allow the unpleasant feeling of pain to naturally arise (see Supplementary Information Each of the 30 trials began with a fixation cross (2100–2900 ms), followed by an To maximize fear, participants were not informed about the chances of receiving a shock (i.e., in one-third of the trials) and were told that shocks could appear at any time after the implementation screen presentation and could be of different durations. To increase the salience of the fear of shocks, we additionally included 5 “safe trials” (distributed pseudo-randomly in the block), where participants knew they had no risk of receiving a shock. These trials began with a fixation cross (2500 ms) on a blue-colored background, signaling that the trial was a safe trial, followed by the presentation of the words “safe trial”.The fear of unpleasant pictures block included 30-trials and was identical to the previous experience—fear of shocks block in all aspects, except for two changes. First, instead of anticipating a possible shock, here participants were anticipating a possible unpleasant picture. Again, they were asked to allow natural thoughts and feelings to arise while anticipating a possible unpleasant picture, without blocking or changing what they feel. In case of an unpleasant picture presentation, participants were asked to continue allowing the unpleasant feelings in response to the picture to naturally arise (see Supplementary Information 