Little is known about why people behave the way they do in threatening situations. Some theories invoke a transfer of responses from unconditioned stimuli (US) to conditioned threat signals (CS), but this principle goes astray, because responses to the US and CS can differ substantially. The idea that we introduce here is that the pattern of responses to a newly established CS does not come from the US, but (at least partly) transfers from how one (learned to) respond(s) to previously encountered stimuli with threat value. So, we conceptualize threat value as a stimulus feature that allows responses to transfer between stimuli that share this feature (in the same way as, for example, overlap in color or shape can support transfer). In contrast to prevailing views, this new perspective focuses on the relation between the CS and already established threat signals rather than on the relation between the CS and the US. We discuss how this shared features perspective on human fear responding can inspire future directions in both the laboratory and clinical practice.

人们对人们在面临威胁的情况下的行为方式知之甚少。一些理论将反应从无条件刺激 (US) 转移到有条件的威胁信号 (CS)，但这一原则出错了，因为对 US 和 CS 的反应可能会有很大不同。我们在此介绍的想法是，对新建立的 CS 的反应模式并非来自美国，而是（至少部分地）从一个人（学会）对先前遇到的具有威胁价值的刺激的反应方式转移而来。因此，我们将威胁值概念化为一种刺激特征，它允许响应在共享该特征的刺激之间转移（与例如颜色或形状的重叠可以支持转移的方式相同）。与主流观点相反，这种新视角侧重于 CS 与已经建立的威胁信号之间的关系，而不是 CS 与美国之间的关系。我们讨论了这种关于人类恐惧反应的共同特征观点如何激发实验室和临床实践的未来方向。