Fear extinction models have a key role in our understanding of anxiety disorders and their treatment with exposure therapy. Here, we tested whether individual differences in fear extinction learning and fear extinction recall in the laboratory were associated with the outcomes of an exposure therapy analog (ETA). Fifty adults with fear of spiders participated in a two-day fear-learning paradigm assessing fear extinction learning and fear extinction recall, and then underwent a brief ETA. Correlational analyses indicated that enhanced extinction learning was associated with better ETA outcome. Our results partially support the idea that individual differences in fear extinction learning may be associated with exposure therapy outcome, but suggest that further research in this area is needed.
We studied the temporal stability of individual differences in the acquisition and generalization of fear. Seventy-one participants were tested in two almost identical fear-acquisition and fear-generalization sessions (separated by 8 months). Acquisition and generalization were measured by the fear-potentiated startle, the skin conductance response, and online expectancies of the unconditioned stimulus. To control for the effects of previous experience, different stimuli were used for half of the participants in Session 2. Acquisition and generalization did not differ across sessions or as a function of the stimuli used in Session 2, and a significant proportion of individual differences in these processes was stable over time (generalizability coefficients ranged from 0.17 to 0.38). When the same stimuli were used, acquisition measures showed compromised stability. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and applied implications.
Abnormal fear conditioning processes (including fear acquisition and conditioned fear-generalization) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. Previous research has shown that individuals with panic disorder present enhanced conditioned fear-generalization in comparison to healthy controls. Enhanced conditioned fear-generalization could also characterize generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), but research so far is inconclusive. An important confounding factor in previous research is comorbidity. The present study examined conditioned fear-acquisition and fear-generalization in 28 patients with GAD and 30 healthy controls using a recently developed fear acquisition and generalization paradigm assessing fear-potentiated startle and online expectancies of the unconditioned stimulus. Analyses focused on GAD patients without comorbidity but included also patients with comorbid anxiety disorders. Patients and controls did not differ as regards fear acquisition. However, contrary to our hypothesis, both groups did not differ either in most indexes of conditioned fear-generalization.Moreover, dimensional measures of GAD symptoms were not correlated with conditioned fear-generalization indexes. Similar results were obtained for patients with comorbidity.These results suggest that conditioned fear-generalization is not enhanced in GAD. Results are discussed with special attention to the possible effects of comorbidity on fear learning abnormalities.
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