The rubber-hand illusion is an illusion where a person embodies a rubber hand as if it were their own. After embodiment, many studies have threatened the false hand and measured physiological responses to the threat for the purposes of verification. For the first time, we tested if embodiment of the false hand could be modulated with a fearful stimulus already present prior to the elicitation of the illusion. This was done by having a live huntsman spider placed on top of the false hand for the entire duration of testing. We also examined if the procedure could change implicit attitudes towards spiders. The results revealed that the embodiment of the false hand with the fearful stimulus on top of it occurred as strongly as when the latter was not there, suggesting that the top-down processing of fearful stimuli is not strong enough to influence bottom-up processes. However, implicit attitudes towards spiders did not change.

橡皮手的错觉是一个人将橡皮手像自己一样体现出来的错觉。在实施之后，为了验证的目的，许多研究已经威胁到假手并测量了对该威胁的生理反应。第一次，我们测试了在假想产生之前，是否可以通过已经存在的恐惧刺激来调节假手的实施方式。这是通过在整个测试过程中将一只活着的猎人蜘蛛放在假手的顶部来完成的。我们还检查了该程序是否可以改变对蜘蛛的内在态度。结果表明，在可怕的刺激作用下，假手的出现与不存在刺激的情况一样强烈，提示自上而下的恐惧刺激处理能力不足以影响自下而上的过程。但是，对蜘蛛的内在态度并没有改变。