Overview of the experimental design and procedures.

The vicarious fear conditioning paradigm consisted of a learning stage, in which the participant watched videos of a demonstrator receiving electric shocks paired with a predictive visual cue, followed by a test stage, in which an increased skin conductance response (SCR) to the cue compared to a control stimulus, in the absence of the demonstrator, indexed vicarious fear learning. Each participant completed this paradigm under two different hypnotic suggestions, which were administered before each learning stage to induce high or low affect sharing with the demonstrator (order counterbalanced across participants). Each suggestion was revoked (so-called “cancellation”) after the learning stage to bring the participants back to their habitual level of affect sharing before the start of the test stage. Eye tracking was used to assess eye gaze during the learning stages. The demonstrators’ heads have been masked in this Figure to protect their identity; participants saw their full face and expressions.