A former study with scenarios conducted in Hawaii has suggested that humans share with non-human mammals the same basic defensive strategies - risk assessment, freezing, defensive threat, defensive attack, and flight. The selection of the most adaptive strategy is strongly influenced by features of the threat stimulus - magnitude, escapability, distance, ambiguity, and availability of a hiding place. Aiming at verifying if these strategies would be consistent in a different culture, 12 defensive scenarios were translated into Portuguese and adapted to the Brazilian culture. The sample consisted of male and female undergraduate students divided into two groups: 76 students, who evaluated the five dimensions of each scenario and 248 medical students, who... |